At the annual OCEANS 2021 in San Diego, Sofar Ocean Technologies, the world’s largest real-time ocean intelligence platform, introduced a new marine hardware standard, Bristlemouth, aimed at catalyzing more collaboration, research and innovation for big data from the oceans.

Sofar CEO, Tim Janssen, will join partners from DARPA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Oceankind to unveil Bristlemouth and its full-stack capabilities for ocean sensing, discovery and intelligence. Potential applications of Bristlemouth range from climate science research and extreme weather forecasting to commercial sectors including offshore renewables and insurance. View the event’s panel discussion “Connected Oceans with Bristlemouth: Bridging Public and Private Sector to Launch Open Standard” by registering for OCEANS 2021 here.

“While big data on land and in space have grown rapidly through standardized methods, economies of scale and distributed sensor networks, the ocean remains largely unmapped and unexplored, due to a lack of scalable ocean sensing strategies,” said Mike Wardlaw, program manager at the Office of Naval Research. “We believe Bristlemouth solves that gap and will enable increased levels of data from the oceans that will in turn accelerate growth in marine technology and applications, empowering an ecosystem of innovation and cross-industry collaboration.”

Traditionally, ocean discovery platforms and sensors require customized components and protocols, making integration efforts costly and difficult and ultimately, creating a barrier to scaling innovation. The launch of the Bristlemouth open standard unleashes a low-cost connector, interface module and application protocol to deliver true flexible inter-connectivity. Its compact, ocean-proof design functions at full ocean depth for long dwell deployments and delivers hundreds of watts and up to hundreds of megabits per second of data, providing critical insights into the unexplored depths of our oceans.

“With the availability of low-cost IoT hardware, advances in battery and photovoltaic technologies, and development of alternative satellite communications, scalable ocean sensing is already within reach,” said Evan Shapiro, CTO at Sofar Ocean. “Until now, what has been missing is a full-stack connectivity standard. We developed Bristlemouth in response to the gaps in ocean sensing connectivity and are providing new components and third-party sensor packages to make it frictionless.”

Globally, organizations such as Oceankind, whose mission is to improve the health of global ocean ecosystems, are utilizing data from Sofar to inform conservation and innovation efforts. Alongside DARPA and ONR, Oceankind is funding Bristlemouth to support more accessible environmental monitoring and ultimately, leverage the open source platform into existing projects to help solve the enormous challenges facing the ocean.

“Oceankind was created to support strategic organizations and promising initiatives that seek to improve the health of the marine environment. Climate change is eradicating coral reefs, kelp forests and other vital ecosystems at an exponential pace,” said Jason Thompson, CTO at Oceankind. “We funded Bristlemouth to enable marine innovators to generate real-time subsurface insights that provide a greater understanding of our ocean environments to help advance science and technology needed to reverse growing climate threats.”

“At the end of the day, building a more sustainable future requires collaboration, integration and greater transparency into our oceans, which drives most of our climate,” said Tim Janssen, CEO and co-founder of Sofar Ocean. “We’ve been amazed by the work achieved with Bristlemouth and look forward to the insights, technologies and solutions it helps to uncover next.”

For more information please visit sofarocean.com.