seatrac-tobea

SEATRAC – One step closer to accessible tourism

Meet SEATRAC – The Platform that give people with disabilities the opportunity to enjoy swimming!

The story of SEATRAC started when the founders were young, when they had the curiosity and liked to take things apart and put them back together. This interest led the founders to follow the career of engineers. Although, they enjoyed their profession:

They wanted to be more useful members of the society.

They wanted to be life changers. So they went from thing to thing for a while and then while hanging out with a new friend they came through the idea. They found the purpose they were looking for…

Their friend is just like us but has a different way to get around. He uses a wheelchair. Just like them, he loves the Greek summers that always include the sea.
Their friend shared with them that he was tired of asking for assistance to get in and out of the water. After the initial surprise that there is nothing in the market that can assist, they started to work on a solution that incorporated all of the needs to achieve this.

This is the origin story of SEATRAC.

 

seatrac-tobeaTOBEA

Thanks to Professor Vassilis Kostopoulos and the initiator Gerasimos Fessian, vice-prefect of Prefecture of Achaia at that time, they secured the first location and when the product became viable, they founded the TOBEA LTD company, in order to continue deployment and develop more products. Creativity requires a bit of quirkiness. Thinking out of the box encourages that. They know that ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. Engineering is for products and for people, as they say.

The founders of TOBEA Ltd company are Ignatios Fotiou and George Sotiriadis. They started while their studies at Patras University and continued the work towards the full commercialization that became TOBEA Ltd. Along with Professor Vassilis Kostopoulos they formed the research group that carried out the collaborative project of AML. TOBEA is a spin-off of the University of Patras.

The main notion behind the creation of SEATRAC was to give people with disabilities the opportunity to enjoy a simple leisure activity, such as swimming, completely unassisted. SEATRAC is basically composed by a fixed track platform in which a wheel chair can be moved in and out of the water. SEATRAC’s utilizes solar energy as its only power source!

Now, with the development of technology and needs, the team of these innovative engineers is intended to fully upgrade the information and processed data provision around SEATRAC in order the person to have a full view of the area that he/she will visit in real time. So the SEATRAC platform acquires a service and information variety for people and their partners who plan to enjoy the sea!

The research on the SEATRAC platform, as well as other methods to improve the accessibility of tourism in Greece, was carried out in term of data collection on the implementation of the European Project Growmat.

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