INTERWHALE Project

With the aim to reduce costs, pollution and stress on these species, INTERWHALE aims to develop a near real-time (NRT) technology for off-shore data gathering and on-shore interactive data exploration, creating a simulator of responsible whale-watching.

Aligned with the UN SDG14: Life Below Water, INTERWHALE focuses on reducing the man-made stress on the marine ecosystem and has objectives to:

1 - SENSE - Using the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect the whale media (footage, acoustics and sea weather data) from sea vessels acting as data mules; It will provide more robust technology for data inquiry, challenging the current state of the art in IoT sensing and biodiversity monitoring in aquatic environments. IoT devices will be attached and compared against sea-vessel, sea glider, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) and Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV);

2 - TRANSMIT - Using the Long-Range (LoRa) open radio protocol to share the collected data from sea vessels to the on-shore in near real-time (NRT); It contributes to exploring free bandwidth, advancing the LoRa studies in aquatic surface telemetry. Experiments will compare diverse whale media payloads, ranging from raw data to acoustic and video files, using the LoRa telemetry (868 MHz);

3 - SIMULATE - Using Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), to immerse the on-shore audience with NRT interfaces depicting the collected whale media; It challenges the scarce effort of HCI with marine interfaces, allowing the remote exploration of the whales. Physical and digital environments will be compared in the wild, based on the geodesic domes and Augmented Reality (AR), portraying the whale media and studying their effect on the pro-environmental attitude of the on-shore audience.

This project is aligned with the following Sustainable Development Goal (SDG):