Design and development of Smart Water Quality Monitoring System Using IoT

Abstract

As water is one of the basic needs of human beings, shortage of water we cannot live on. Water pollution and scarcity, are current global problems that require modification of water resources and guiding principles from the international level to individual wells. Water pollution is the leading cause of diseases worldwide. Previously, water quality monitoring was done through a physical collection of data; there was no smart sensor system. This led to inefficiency, especially, in real-time data access, device monitoring, and less accurate collection of data. There is a need to integrate mechanisms to monitor water quality in real-time, to ensure a safe supply of drinking water. Hence, the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) which allows connections between various devices that can exchange and gather data emerged. To solve these issues, a low-cost real-time that is real-time platform based on the Internet of Things (IoT), and LoRa (Long Range) technology is proposed for monitoring water quality. The platform will measure and collect critical information about water quality. Such quality involves parameters like pH value, turbidity, and temperature of the surrounding atmosphere. The platform will additionally establish communication to the end-user, through LoRa Gateway and the internet. It will simultaneously provide data access, accurate data collection, and supervision of the component, whereby the user will notice if the virtual device is not receiving any data at a given time interval. The developed platform will consist of five different parts: sensor devices, IoT Board, Lora Gateway, cloud server, and user domain. The Lora Getaway will transmit the sensor data to the cloud through the internet to the cloud server. The cloud server is equipped with Matlab analysis and visualization applications which manipulate and analyze the data, to monitor the quality of the water. In the end, the useful information is visualized from the user domain for any decision-making process. The paper argues that the proposed platform is important in ensuring a safe supply of quality drinking water for people worldwide.