Universities, R&D Groups and Academic Networks

We are in the middle of a refugee crisis. More than 172,000 people have arrived from Turkey to Greece through its sea border. More than

4,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean during their journey in 2016.

This requires imminent actions due to the fact that NATO vessels and the Greek coastguard cannot secure the sea border to its whole extent. 

This results in refugees losing their lives. Furthermore, the humanitarian crisis that Greece suffers from does not allow the islands to accept a vast number of refugees. Hence, there is a need to stop the trafficking, done by the refugee-traders at their places of action. This will have a major impact to the EU in general, since the refugee flows will be minimised.

To this end, a system is essential to emerge that will assist the NATO forces and Greek coastguard to their heavy duties of rescuing lives. 

Since the origins of the flows are usually opposite the nearest Greek islands, we propose a system that will be installed on the Greek sea border that will detect any unauthorized vessel and report it to the authorities to act immediately. This system will consist of different state-of-the-art sensors that will perform monitoring and tracking tasks.

Our objective is the installation of a Wireless Sensor Network at specific places where maximum flows have been observed, in order to prevent other refugees from drowning and the traders to attempt such a journey.

The NEXES Research and Innovation Action aims to research, test and validate the promising integration of IP-based communication technologies and interoperability into the next generation emergency services, so that they attain increased effectiveness and performance. Empowered by smartphones with cameras, messaging and internet-based applications connecting to social media, citizens expect emergency services to use the same technologies. However, this is not the case.

NEXES innovates the approach to the dynamics between emergency services and citizens, allowing (i) the use of total conversation capabilities in emergencies, including social media, to the benefit of citizens, including those with disability or special needs (ii) the exploitation of improved location information to rapidly and effectively identify and locate the caller and the incident site and (iii) the leverage of Internet-enabled connectivity to enhance interoperability and shared awareness among emergency services, to the benefit of a more secure society.

The NEXES Consortium gathers world-class European entities, well experienced in the research and development of innovative solutions for communications and emergency products and solutions. The NEXES Team presents extensive background knowledge and in-house solutions to adapt, test and validate in NEXES’s open Testing Regime and Validation Framework, ensuring solid results are achieved to produce relevant Recommendations and contributions to Europe’s standardisation effort on emergency services. To leverage related dissemination and market exploitation activities, the NEXES System, Apps and its operational benefits are demonstrated in three realistic pilots to end- users and stakeholders. In fact, end-users’ involvement, directly ensured by NEXES Partners and indirectly by invited Advisors, is a key contributor to guarantee NEXES’s operational validity as a reference implementation system for next generation emergency services.

To learn more, please see: www.nexes.eu.