Helen Knight

IoT system overcomes challenge of ensuring safety at sea

News

When a ship gets into trouble at sea, finding every crew member on board and getting them to safety in time can be an enormous challenge, and lives can be lost.

Now crew members could be immediately located during an emergency, thanks to a wireless mesh-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) system, developed by Norwegian maritime technology company ScanReach.

The In:Mesh system is based on a series of individual wireless nodes, placed in each room on board the vessel, according to John Roger Nesje, CEO at ScanReach.

Conventional Wi-Fi networks, which operate on a frequency of 2.4GHz, do not work well in the largely steel environment on board ships. Wi-Fi access points also require cabling, which is difficult and expensive to retrofit onto existing vessels, and can be damaged, said Nesje.

“We realised quite early on that we couldn’t rely on any system with cables, because during a fire the cables will burn, and during very many emergency situations power will be lost,” he said. “So we needed something that could still operate during an emergency situation, which meant something that was locally powered by battery, and completely wireless.”

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