Interviews: ALMEIDA, Bruno (UNP)
Mr. ALMEIDA, Bruno
CEO at Unparallel Innovation (UNP)
What is your role in CHAMELEON?
Frontend developer and technical integrators.
How does your expertise contribute to the overarching goals of the CHAMELEON project?
As a frontend developer and a technical integrator expert, UNPARALLEL have integrated many projects, which gave us a wide experience and background in this field. For example, as a frontend developer, UNPARALLEL developed the IoT Catalogue, different marketplaces from projects such as STAR, AI4PublicPolicy, FAR-EDGE and INFINITECH, and platforms like SMARTCLIDE and I3MARKET. On another hand, as technical integrators, our experience can be materialized in projects such as COSMOS, MEDSECURANCE and SMARTCLIDE.
What are the main advantages CHAMELEON will bring to European citizens?
The CHAMELEON methodology, combined with the use of drones, will be of added value to European citizens, especially in two areas. On the one hand, it will reduce production costs because it detects problems much earlier and much faster than without its use. On the other hand, as there is increased monitoring of products, they will have better quality. In this sense, European citizens will be able to benefit from higher quality products at a lower price.
How will the introduction of CHAMELEON impact the daily operations of rural workers?
The introduction of CHAMELEON will help the daily operations of rural workers because it will deliver an inspection and monitoring platform with advanced capabilities which will have important advantages in a wide set of missions like reducing the time required to perform tasks by helping people with a drone and giving decision-makers access to more up-to-date data. It will reduce the need for on-site inspectors as images taken by drones can be reviewed by a resource anywhere in the world and potential to reduce operating costs by minimising the number of resources required to perform tasks. Finally, it will improve monitoring and maintenance capacity of agricultural and forest sites by ensuring better attention to detail and breadth of coverage.
How is CHAMELEON designed to be user-friendly for those less familiar with technology in rural settings?
The CHAMELEON design process follows a user-centred design without the need to be experts, and a participatory design approach to ensure accessibility and usability for everyone. In this sense, a platform capable of displaying all the data collected easily, almost like a game, is being designed, to increase its ease of use. At the same time, a tool is being developed to interpret the data collected, which facilitates understanding and makes it more intuitive for farmers to adopt and make management decisions more efficiently, without the need to be experts or without the experts’ help.
