This blog post was written by the authors of a recent Water Supply paper and summarises the key features of the research.
Details of the full paper can be found below:
Monitoring and forecasting water consumption and detecting leakage using an IoT system
Jyoti Gautam, Amlan Chakrabarti, Shruti Agarwal, Anushka Singh, Shweta Gupta and Jatin Singh
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2166/ws.2020.035
Water is an important resource for the existence of life on Earth. But, unfortunately, different individuals in a society are wasting large quantities of water on a daily basis. So, monitoring the consumption of water is vital to control water usage. Smart technologies can play a useful role here. The technical aspect of this paper is based on an Internet of Things (IoT) based smart system that helps users to visualize water usage using a web interface to monitor the water consumption in an urban housing complex.
The smart IoT system consists of an ultrasonic sensor, together with an Arduino node, which continuously monitors the water level of a water tank on a rooftop and sends the data to a server through a Wi-Fi module. The analytics engine works on the time series data and uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based forecasting model at the server end to estimate the water usage. The same system can be installed as a network of IoT nodes for a housing society having multiple water tanks and the collected data would help in understanding the Water Usage Patterns of the people in that society. The system can be enhanced with Fog Nodes for an urban area having multiple housing establishments and finally, the data can be sent to the cloud for running the analytics engine. Our proposed IoT based system and the analytics engine could help further in understanding the daily/weekly/monthly/seasonal requirements of water for a district or city and finally the country as a whole.
This is a very significant system if seen from a social perspective, since it would be helpful to predict the future water requirements based on the collected data and would rather help in distributing equal quantities of water to all the people. Underground Water is depleting at many places in India and abroad. It is very hard to generate good quality water for the human beings, but, at least, it can be utilized in an optimal manner. So that, our future generations are not devoid of the very essential resource required for the existence and sustainability of life on our beautiful planet, the Earth.
Read the full paper here.
