About the research

 In Iceland and other countries, fishing on small 1-2 man boats constitutes an important branch of their fisheries. Boating and sailing is a popular sport in most countries having land to sea. Lives have been lost due to the fact that a man falls over board and remains undetected for an extended period of time because he was alone on the boat and had no means of sending a distress signal. Upon man-over-board detection, the on-boat system initialises communication with a wearable device on the person over board. The device receives almanac and ephemeris info for instantaneous GPS/Galileo positioning. This research project aims at detecting when a person falls over board and transmit a distress signal to a rescue operations centre. Waters close to land are in many cases well covered with mobile telecommunications signals from e.g. 3G or 4G base stations. Furthermore, satellite communications can be used to convey distress signals, the European Galileo system being the most recent example.

See further details