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Autonomous monitoring of flow rates is being piloted by a few groups, including Oxford University, SweetLabs, Charity:Water, and my own organization WellDone (https://www.welldone.org).

Flow rates can be measured or estimated using several different methods (turbine, conductivity, capacitance, handle accelerometer, etc.) each with its share of trade-offs. WellDone has used primarily turbine meters and will be testing non-invasive ultrasound in our next deployments. Retrieving this data robustly and cost-effectively is a significant challenge for which we hope to provide a general-purpose solution. For rural water infrastructure monitoring all of the remote monitoring products today use an integrated cellphone that reports over the GSM network.

Water quality is more difficult since it is not currently feasible to automatically detect specific bacteria (such as e coli). There are indicator "symptoms" such as water temperature, turbidity, and pH that can be measured reliably, but they do not reliably correlate with harmful bacteria content.

I hope this helps somewhat, I am more than happy to discuss in more detail offline if you are interested!

Austin

Autonomous monitoring of flow rates is being piloted by a few groups, including Oxford University, SweetLabs, Charity:Water, and my own organization WellDone (https://www.welldone.org).

Flow rates can be measured or estimated using several different methods (turbine, conductivity, capacitance, handle accelerometer, etc.) each with its share of trade-offs. WellDone has used primarily turbine meters and will be testing non-invasive ultrasound in our next deployments. Retrieving this data robustly and cost-effectively is a significant challenge for which we hope to provide a general-purpose solution. For rural water infrastructure monitoring all of the remote monitoring products today use an integrated cellphone that reports over the GSM network.

Water quality is more difficult since it is not currently feasible to automatically detect specific bacteria (such as e coli). e-coli). There are indicator "symptoms" such as water temperature, turbidity, and pH that can be measured reliably, but they do not reliably correlate with harmful bacteria content.

I hope this helps somewhat, I am more than happy to discuss in more detail offline if you are interested!

Austin