Connected safety for the boater
Weems & Plath's Crew Watcher won the DAME Award 2017 in the safety and rescue equipment category. The system, offered by the American company of navigation instruments and safety equipment, operates with a telephone and small personal cylindrical beacons. An application to download on a telephone or a tablet manages the alarms. When a beacon, carried by a crew member, is immersed or leaves the Bluetooth coverage area of the phone, an audible alert is triggered on the phone. The longitude, latitude and time of the crew member's fall overboard are stored. The application then indicates in real time the distance to travel and the direction to follow to reach the event site.
An application can follow up to 5 tags. Several devices can broadcast alerts for the same tag. The battery of the beacons has a life of 3 years.
Second consecutive RAME for anti BOM applications
The jury stated that the Crew Watcher received the DAME Award because of the simplicity of the application. "After much debate, the jury decided that the Crew Watcher should be the winner in this category in 2017, because of the particularly simple and intuitive design of its application interface and the way it looked easy to use, right after it came out of the box We may be surprised by this choice, whereas the French Sea-Tags, whose anti-man overboard bracelet, which works very closely, has already won the DAME Award in 2016. Contacted by BoatIndustry, the company says it is surprised, but since the use of the signal break as an alert method is not patentable, it prefers to consider that the arrival of a new entrant on the market will help to develop anti-human overboard devices. On the other hand, it insists on its SMS shore alert functionality, which Crew Watcher does not offer.
