Objectives of the service
SATIM's motivation is to introduce new service on the market and provide customers with direct access to information about the ground deformations in their area. The lack of this information is a significant problem for people living in endangered areas.
SAT-DEFO is the warning system for inhabitants of areas threatened with ground deformations. The solution has the form of a mobile application allowing user to define areas for which he will receive information on the occurrence and scale of ground deformations. The areas can be defined by the address/addresses or land plot(s) number(s). In case of ground deformation occurring, the user receives a message with information about the deformations through the mobile application.
Such monitoring can be useful to the residents and investors in many aspects, for example in choosing the optimal location for investment, in considering threats in their environment or in claiming for compensation from mining industry due to mining-caused damages.
Users and their needs
Inhabitants of areas threatened with ground deformations often struggle with damages of their properties. In these cases, they can apply for compensation from mining companies (in case of mining-based subsidence) or from municipalities (in case of landslides). Although not all damages, like cracks or lopsided floors, have to be connected with mining activities or landslides phenomenon.
It can be concluded that the disadvantages of the existing methods of ground subsidence monitoring generate a need for a new service providing cost-effective information about ground deformations in an easy, understandable way.
User needs in this aspect can be formulated as follows:
- time saving and affordable measurements,
- reliable information for compensation cases,
- single source of information,
- simple order mechanism and easy to understand results.
Poland, Ukraine, Republic of South Africa, Australia, India, Pakistan, China, Russia, etc
Service/ system concept
The SAT-DEFO system can provide the recipient with information about ground subsidence in the form of alerts and reports. The specific features of the service are as follows:
- the possibility of using the app for free,
- creating the benefits for active users of our app (benefits that are suitable for specific persona of the app user),
- making the product (and the results it generates) understandable for everyone by the way of product/marketing communication,
- the content of such aspects as map, changelog, additional benefits for paid access, shares etc.
SAT-DEFO is based on MineSAR software, developed by SATIM.
Development of the project is done in Cloud Architecture. SAT-DEFO is able to use DIAS (the platform that provides and operates a cloud infrastructure adapted to the processing of big amount of EO data) for data selection, repetitive processing of large data sets, complex computing activities, algorithm development, and publishing results. SAT-DEFO is developed in Java programming language, only with use Open Source modules and libraries. The application is not limited to the operating system.
Space Added Value
The SAT-DEFO is using SAR data from the Sentinel-1 mission.
The advantages of our application over the current solutions used by our target group:
- Radar satellite measurements are a reliable source of information about ground deformations (instead of own observations of users or information from their neighbours).
- Our app shows the results for the particular area, for the particular real estate (instead of maps of administrative boundaries and mining areas, which shows it only for the region, in general).
- Users are not dependent on a mine and it's solutions.
- If anything changes with a property the app notifies owners of properties.
The advantages of our application over the competitors:
- communication style: creating content that is understandable for all the users regarding the KISS rule (Keep It Stupid Simple), focusing on the social aspects of interaction with customers.
Current Status
Right now we are discussing with ESA the continuation to demo project.
At the further stages of work, we would like to focus on more detailed research (e.g. on markets on other continents than Europe), executing the marketing strategy, and creating/testing the app.
