Coastal Monitoring System Based on Social Internet of Things Platform

Coast erosion is a process that degrades a coastal profile and is mainly due to natural factors (e.g., related to climate change) and overcrowding (e.g., urbanization and massive tourism). While the first cause can be considered as a slow process, the growing presence of humans is leading to rapid aging of coasts. The Mediterranean Sea authorities are focusing on the necessity for a systematic and comprehensive approach to the management of littoral areas. In this context, Italy is searching for a promising solution to safeguard coasts but, at the same time, to manage in an intelligent and “green” way the big amount of tourists. Research communities all over the world indicated the Internet of Things (IoT) as a valid technology to develop solutions in order to try solving or mitigating the coastal erosion problem. IoT-based techniques allow to manage heterogeneous and massive data for real-time monitoring and decision making and can be used for coastal environment and crowd level monitoring. This article presents a monitoring system based on the Social IoT (SIoT), a new paradigm that defines a network where every node is an object capable of establishing the social relationships with other things in an autonomous way according to specific rules. Thanks to social relationships, all involved devices in the monitoring system (i.e., sensors, cameras, and smartphones) are able to collect and exchange information. The proposed system, developed and installed in Cagliari (Italy), is able to evaluate the occupational state of a beach considering environmental and crowding data collected by devices and feedback sent by users.