Nowadays the promotion of the new technologies support has been considered as a great opportunity to improve the coastal regions development and the fishermen profitability, diversifying local economies and finding new market niches. In that sense Cudillero Council has been chosen to research on collaborative technologies to provide people involved in the fishing sector in Cudillero with tools to innovate in their commercial processes, giving greater visibility to their products and to optimize the resources exploitation contributing to the sustainable fishing sector development through collaboration on board – on shore. 

Cudillero Council is located in the western coast of the Asturias Principality in the North of Spain. This Council consists of 78 population centers distributed in 9 municipalities in which one can find the Cudillero and Oviñana villages where the two fishing ports of the Council are located. 

The fishing sector is a strategic sector in Cudillero Council due to elements, not only socioeconomic but historical and cultural. The number of economic activities generated from this sector is concentrated in the coastal regions with a deep fishing tradition and in economies depending basically on this sector. Cudillero Living Lab aims to provide people involved in the fishing sector in Cudillero with tools to innovate in their commercial processes, giving greater visibility to their products.

The collaborative platform is being developed for their application to the specific scenario of “hake fished by hook” art. In this kind of fishery, several small vessels are concentrated in the same fishing grounds. Such a specific scenario is of significant interest because of the high transferability of the solutions to be developed to a large diversity of fishing arts that are routinely performed in small vessels in playgrounds near the shore.
Within this scenario, the Cudillero Living Lab development intends to benefit from a collaborative platform with tools to:

- provide the skippers in the vessels and the inspection and fishing surveillance services with mobile wearable devices in order to facilitate exchange of information among the different actors in the collaborative fishery scenario.

- find out which access networks (GPRS, UMTS, WiMax or other wireless standards, Satellite) can be available for the use of these mobile devices.

- develop applications to include functionalities to manage alerts on board, catches reports and technologies for collaboration on board-on shore.