institutions • A few specialised
private companies sell services usually to the public administration
Environmental sector:
environmental monitoring for healthcare
Type of data used in this domain:
• Earth observation and satellite
communication Current data providers: • Mainly US (Landsat) • Other national satellite
systems • EU (Sentinel-1 and 2) Monitoring of environmental parameters for: • Land management • Protection of natural habitats • Air pollution • Water quality • Solar radiation • Air quality • Improved policy planning
• Increase of life quality
Generation of space data Data acquisition & elaboration Production of downstream services Generation of benefits Forthcoming Copernicus satellites (Sentinel 3, 4 5, 6) will provide a huge amount of highly relevant data • Applications and services potentially adressed to a large number of citizens • Scope for ad hoc policy
stimulus • As data sources
increase, the demand for high computing services can also grow Need of high
perfomance computing and distribution data systems to elaborate data
• With ageing population healthcare will be more and more important
• Other possible future benefit: reduction of healthcare costs
Source: Authors
Background
When thinking about health care and space industry, one’s thoughts are on satellite communication systems. They provide cost-effective and accessible solutions for remote medical diagnosis and remote medical care, not only in developing countries but also to the European ageing population. Today Earth observation satellites can also play an important role in this sector, by enabling the monitoring of chemical, physical, and biological parameters at local, regional and global scales. Satellites data can be used for monitoring a large number of environmental parameters influencing our quality of life. This is the typical case of public interest’s application domain, but there is also room for a private market, potentially addressed to a large number of citizens.
The European Copernicus programme will collect a huge amount of data for monitoring the health of our planet. For example:
Sentinel-1 satellites will help managing the marine environment and its resources, giving timely maps of sea-ice conditions for safe passage in the Arctic waters or offering information on wind and waves, imaging the entire Earth every six days
Sentinel-2 satellites will deliver information on plant’s health, water bodies or land imaged in 13 different wavelengths and with a five days revisit time (when both satellites will be operational);
the forthcoming Sentinel-3 satellite will measure the Earth’s topography, its surface temperature and ocean colour, in support of ocean forecasting systems and for environmental and climate monitoring;
the next Sentinel-4 and -5 missions will be dedicated to monitoring the composition of the atmosphere in support of European policies. Services based on Sentinel-4 and -5 will include the monitoring of air quality, stratospheric ozone, solar radiation, and climate monitoring;
Sentinel-6 is expected to give high-precision observations of the topography of the global ocean every 10 days. This information is extremely useful for the study of ocean currents, wind speed and wave height, both for maritime safety and for protecting the coastal zones.
Example of downstream services addressed to institutional users
Environment is the main application field where remote sensing has been used. Besides, the monitoring of the environmental changes and dynamics is one of the Government’s prerogatives. Some examples of services and products offered by NGOs at global scale are:
Land management: The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations delivers the “Global Land Cover-SHARE” database (see Figure 20)70. This product collects scattered and unharmonised land cover information of the Earth’s surface from around the world into one centralized database. Applications of the database include assessment, monitoring and reporting of the distribution of the major land cover classes, land suitability evaluation, land accounting, environmental accounting, climate change impact assessments in productivity and yields, land use planning and sustainable development addressing food security and environmental threats.
Protection of natural habitats: satellite imagery makes it possible understanding the cause of changes in land use and land cover around the world at different spatial scales. NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) use satellite-based maps in their study and reports to inform Governments and citizens about the consequences of practices such as deforestation, expansion of agriculture or land fragmentation on natural habitats (see an example of thematic map in Figure 21).
Air pollution: The Regional Environmental Center (REC) for Central and Eastern Europe provides assistance in solving environmental problems in Central and Eastern Europe by promoting cooperation among governments, NGOs, businesses and other environmental stakeholders. REC was established in 1990 by the United States, Hungary and the European Commission as a not-for-profit international organisation. Its satellite assisted management of air quality has been developed as a toolkit for institutional users for managing air quality information (e.g. on PM10).
Figure 20: The Global Land Cover-SHARE database provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Source: FAO (http://www.glcn.org/databases/img/glcshare_map_large.jpg).
Figure 21: Percentage of land area formally protected, by terrestrial ecoregion
Source: WWF (2014).
Example of commercial downstream services
Water quality: EOMAP GmbH & Co. KG71 is an independent German company selling Earth observation services for monitoring aquatic environments. EOMAP products are focused on the monitoring of water quality parameters such as turbidity, suspended matter, chlorophyll-a and harmful algae blooms using satellite data. This information for both inland and coastal waters is essential for identifying long-term trends and highlighting emerging problems over large areas (Figure 22).
71 http://www.eomap.com/.
Solar radiation: Flyby72 is an Italian private company offering commercial products based on optical satellite images in several fields. Among its services, HappySun is an innovative app for smartphones that provides real-time information about UV solar radiation intensity (Figure 23). The service can help tourists and citizens to protect themselves from solar radiation by monitoring the local environmental conditions based on geolocation from GNSS and images coming from different ESA’s Earth observation satellites which provide data regarding the characteristics of atmosphere, water and soil.
Air quality: ObsAIRve is an EU-funded public–private consortium made of the German private companies T-Systems International GmbH73 and GAF AG74, and the public entities German Aerospace Center75 and Environment Agency76. ObsAIRve offers a pilot service (see Figure 24) making use of data provided by the European Earth observation satellites and in situ monitoring stations for providing up-to-date air quality information for Europe (measurement values as well as forecast model data). The goal is to provide European citizens an air quality service that shows easy and comprehensible information for their safety and security.
High performance computing: Terradue UK Ltd77 is a SME supporting researchers in many Earth Sciences domains such as geosciences, marine ecosystems, oceans and coastal zones, and climate change. The company’s activities focus on the use of web services, web protocols, Grid and Cloud APIs, to support distributed spatial data management and high performance computing applications in collaborative digital environments. Terradue offers a service for the management and distribution of very large spatial data sets complemented with data inventory, query and processing systems, carried out collaboratively with open source projects. Customers and partners are space agencies, state/local governments, applied science labs, academic research organizations, international standardization committees, open source software communities and private sector companies.
Market opportunities and threats
Despite the European Commission has funded several research projects within the Seventh Research Framework Programme, the European private market of satellite-based services for health care is still an underdeveloped area. However, this specific market sector has potential to grow in future, as the increasing life expectancy of the European population will bring about new information and service needs.
Some ad hoc policy stimulus could contribute to stimulate this specific market sector. For instance, policies of the health care systems of the European Union’s member states could support the developing of new (private) downstream services, with the final long-term objective of reducing public healthcare costs through a better management of the causes of chronic diseases.
72 http://www.flyby.it. 73 www.t-systems.com. 74 www.gaf.de. 75 www.dlr.de. 76 www.umweltbundesamt.at/en/. 77 https://www.terradue.com/.
Figure 22: eoApp® WQ Monitoring Service. Example of cholorophyll-a retrieval using satellite observations
Source: EOMAP (http://eoapp.eomap.com/).
Figure 23: HappySun app for smartphones
Source: Flyby (http://www.happysun.it/en.html).