Keynote Address: An ICT platform for automated monitoring of the quality of drinking water

Water comes into contact with minerals, salt, vegetation, toxic chemicals, and biological waste, and is never completely pure. Many of these contaminants may pose health risks. About 3.4 million people die every year in the world due to waterborne diseases, and poor sanitation. Regular monitoring of the quality of drinking water and taking proper actions to improve its quality is important for healthy living. This is particularly important in rural areas and underprivileged communities. This talk will address several important aspects of research and development leading to an ICT (information and communication technologies) platform for automated sensing, quality monitoring, assessment, information management, and decision making of drinking water. The addressed key issues are: (a) Automated and remote sensing issues of water quality monitoring; (b) Signal processing and transmission issues; (c) Architecture of the ICT platform; (d) Knowledge-based decision making, with self-adaptation and self-optimization; (e) Utilization of the acquired knowledge for short-term and long-term purposes; and (f) Societal impact of the developed technologies on community health. The developed system consists of multiple sensor nodes that are geographically distributed and have the capability of wireless communication to local microcontrollers. After some basic processing, the gathered information is transmitted by the microcontrollers to a central assessment unit. The system analyzes the geographic and temporal information and provides advisories, warnings, trends, forecasts, and suggested actions. Robustness, speed, low-cost, and user-friendliness are key features of the developed system.