The Sitges beaches that do not have a permanent on-site lifeguard service will have 5 smart buoys that will collect data on the state of the sea, in real time. This information will be transmitted immediately to the municipal officials so that they can make the appropriate decisions on bathing alerts that may occur on each of these beaches. The ultimate goal is for lifeguard services to have objective data to better perform their surveillance function in these spaces.
This innovative project is based on a signaling system with beaconing buoys that delimit the safe bathing and navigation area. Sensors are inserted into the yellow buoys, located 200 meters from the coastline, which collect the state of the sea in real time and a series of environmental parameters: day, position, temperature, wave height, origin and direction of the current, among others. From here, it classifies the danger of the wave based on its height and the system automatically determines if the bath is suitable. It is not when the wave is higher than 1.8-2 meters.
This is a project led by the Center for Technological Development of Remote Acquisition Systems and Information Processing (SARTI) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia - BarcelonaTech (UPC) and the company Ona Safe & Clean. The 5 buoys that will be placed on the Sitges coast are added to 3 more that the Barcelona Provincial Council will also install in Sant Pol de Mar. The 8 buoys will cost 12,000 euros.