Be Right Beach: A Social IoT System for Sustainable Tourism Based on Beach Overcrowding Avoidance

The coastal erosion is becoming of paramount importance for many countries. Many studies demonstrated that in some cases the beach overcrowding is the primary cause of coastal erosion. The goal of this work was to design, implement and test a system (BRB-Be Right Beach) that foster beach overcrowding avoidance and allows anyone to choose the right beach to go for having the best experience. The major requirement of our system was to have maximum accuracy (no errors, that is real-time data only are used) in the information provided to the users. The system exploits the Social Internet of Things paradigm to implement a classifier trained by a community of smartphones brought by the owners to the beaches. The BRB sensor network consists of control units equipped with a UV sensor, a thermometer, a humidity sensor and a camera for crowdedness estimation. Data are collected by a cloud platform that provide any user with information about beaches and suggestions where to go, based on users preferences like weather, crowdedness, time of travel, and so on.