SmartBay Ireland, as part of a European Research Consortium, will trial and validate a new sensor for detecting biohazards and man-made chemicals. MariaBox is a four-year project which is funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.
Due to growing concerns about the health of our oceans and their capacity to continue to provide resources as well as the associated risk of declining water quality for the general population, there is an increasing demand for real-time monitoring of the environmental status of marine water quality and the provision of early warning systems.
The ambitious project aims to deliver a Marine Pollution-Monitoring device based on new biosensors, implemented as a set of autonomous modules for the analysis of marine pollutants and the assessment of water quality. New biosensors for monitoring five man-made chemicals and four categories of microalgae toxins affecting the Aquaculture industry will be developed in parallel.
SmartBay will lead the development of an innovative software platform and mobile applications, which will allow for data collection and distribution in near real-time. These data will be available and interfaced to Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) services.
The final phase of the project will be the trial, test and validation of the system in four locations across Europe. SmartBay Ireland’s knowledge, experience and expertise in marine sensor deployments ensured that Ireland was chosen as one of those sites. Access to SmartBay’s Mobilis Buoy Network will be key to demonstrating and proving this technology within a real-world environment.
The consortium consists of 13 partners from 6 European countries including Norway, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Ireland and the UK, with complementary expertise, that form a unique consortium capable of achieving the project objectives.
