The Water Quality Smart Monitor: A Cost-Conscious Approach for Personal Water Testing

As concerns over water quality escalate, there is an increasing need for efficient and user-friendly methods of assessing water. This paper introduces a water quality monitoring system utilizing a suite of sensors, including oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), turbidity, total dissolved solids (TDS), pH, temperature, and image capture. Most water monitoring devices cost tens of thousands of dollars and are complicated to use. The primary objective is to empower users with an affordable and simple yet effective tool for on-the-spot water quality assessment. The system employs multiple probes, designed to be submerged into a water sample. The collected data is seamlessly transmitted to a smartphone app through wireless connectivity. The app interprets the sensor data and provides users with intuitive feedback on water quality, offering insights into parameters crucial for assessing potability and environmental impact. Key features of this work include realtime monitoring, ensuring rapid detection of water quality in fresh samples, and an easy-to-use interface that requires minimal user input. The integration of image capture with a support vector machine (SVM) adds a visual component, detecting potential contaminants in the water. The smartphone app serves as a user-friendly platform for displaying and interpreting the collected data, making water quality assessment accessible to individuals without specialized knowledge in the field. While a few improvements are necessary to enhance its commercial viability, such as replacing the turbidity sensor, this prototype serves as a proof of concept that water quality assessments can be conducted simply and at a low cost.