Prototyping a Digital Twin System for Environmental Education

Abstract

Our time is characterized by big sprawling urban complexes that a majority of the human population chooses to live where interactions with the environment seem to be vanishing from our day to day lives. Our relationship with the planet’s natural ecosystem is paramount to our survival and well-being, a relationship that begins to form during our childhood years. Considering the above we propose a novel system which aims to give the ability to children to interact with the natural environment even when they have no access to it, from the classrooms in which they spend considerable parts of their lives. Specifically the proposed system is based on the technology of the Digital Twin, a core pillar of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and is comprised of a smart birdhouse and an electronic Digital Twin. The smart birdhouse can be deployed in a natural environment and collect atmospheric data like humidity and temperature values as well as record audio and pictures of possible bird visitors. At the same time the collected data will be available to the end user through a dashboard platform for atmospheric parameters and the digital electronic twin which will play the collected sound or pictures. With the above system we aim to achieve a greater and meaningful engagement of children with their natural habitat even when their urban environment makes it impractical or unfeasible.