Design of an IoT Water Quality Monitoring System for Tropical Fish Aquaculture

Abstract

Water quality is one of the most important factors in fish production and aquaculture. Good water quality helps the fish to live, feed, reproduce and grow. Monitoring water quality parameters is the first step before fish farmer can take action to ensure the water qualities is in the desired condition. Implementation of periodic manual lab sampling to check water quality is cumbersome while dependency on human visual inspection can be inaccurate. This paper proposed a technique to monitor water quality parameters such as turbidity, pH and temperature using an IoT system. Using electronic sensors and a microcontroller, the measurement of the parameters will be read before sending the values via SMS to the user. This system can help the users to know the present turbidity, pH and temperature of the pond water, so they will know when they should perform maintenance actions. The prototyped of the system has been tested for Sumatra Barb species and successfully tested with error measurement of 0, 0.1. 0.12 for turbidity, temperature and pH respectively. Introduction Malaysia is one of the top 15 global producer with 521,000 tonnes of total aquaculture production. Fish farming began as early as the 1920s in Malaysia and has rapidly grown in the last five years (Fathi et al., 2018). As the increased of the demand recently, the management system of producing quality and quantity of the fish has become subject matter of interest among researchers. One of the factors that affects fish growth, performance, and health of the fish is the water quality. Parameter such as pH, temperature, dissolve oxigen, turbidity etc has been identified as indicators of the water quality for healthy habitats of the fish. Table 1 has shown the list of essential parameters and its analytical method to measure the water quality (Wang et al., 2011). Different species of fish have different aspects of water quality within where and how their condition growing. In order to have a good water quality, certain parameter inspection need to be done periodically. This is crucial especially for a large-scale cultivation and intensive farming which have resulted in deterioration of aquaculture water quality and higher rate of aquatic animal diseases (Danh et al., 2020). To monitor the water quality, a routine checking