Real-time water quality monitoring through Internet of Things and ANOVA-based analysis: a case study on river Krishna

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a statistical model based on Internet of Things (IoT) for water quality analysis of river Krishna using different water quality parameters such as pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, biochemical oxygen demand, total dissolved solids and conductivity. These parameters are very important to assess the water quality of the river. The water quality data were collected from six stations of river Krishna in the state of Karnataka. River Krishna is the fourth largest river in India with approximately 1400 km of length and flows from its origin toward Bay of Bengal. In our study, we have considered only stretch of river Krishna flowing in state of Karnataka, i.e., length of about 483 km. In recent years, the mineral-rich river basin is subjected to rapid industrialization, thus polluting the river basin. The river water is bound to get polluted from various pollutants such as the urban waste water, agricultural waste and industrial waste, thus making it unusable for anthropogenic activities. The traditional manual technique that is under use is a very slow process. It requires staff to collect the water samples from the site and take them to the laboratory and then perform the analysis on various water parameters which is costly and time-consuming process. The timely information about water quality is thus unavailable to the people in the river basin area. This creates a perfect opportunity for swift real-time water quality check through analysis of water samples collected from the river Krishna. IoT is one of the ways with which real-time monitoring of water quality of river Krishna can be done in quick time. In this paper, we have emphasized on IoT-based water quality monitoring by applying the statistical analysis for the data collected from the river Krishna. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and two-way ANOVA were applied for the data collected, and found that one-way ANOVA was more effective in carrying out water quality analysis. The hypotheses that are drawn using ANOVA were used for water quality analysis. Further, these analyses can be used to train the IoT system so that it can take the decision whenever there is abnormal change in the reading of any of the water quality parameters.