Marine IoT: Non-invasive wearable multisensory platform for oceanic environment monitoring

Abstract

Progresses in the marine research heavily rely on gathering data about species physiology, mobility, and their habitat to understand the environmental changes and its effects using bulky biologgers and sensory networks that are invasive in nature. In this paper, we demonstrate an advanced lightweight compliant environmental monitoring system: Marine-Skin with enhanced sensing and logging capabilities, having soft-packaging and endurance up to a depth of 2 km in highly saline Red sea water for multiple weeks. Unlike invasive biologgers, we demonstrate a unique non-invasive attachment strategy by designing a wearable jacket from soft-polymers that can be adhered to any species irrespective of their skin type. We have successfully deployed the feather-light (<0.5g in air, 3g with jacket) wearable gadget on Wobbegong shark, Seabream, and common Goldfish to demonstrate the non-invasive and pragmatic attachment mechanism for different species of variable sizes without any hindrance to natural movement or behavior of animal tagged.