‘Water Underground’: Real-time, continuous monitoring of the underground water’s quantity and quality

Water resource management is one the most urgent aspects of environmental protection and sustainability policies world-wide. Accurate, real-time remote sensing of the status of underground reservoirs is required for proper regional planning, prevention of droughts, optimized farming etc. ‘Water Underground’ is a low-cost solution, based on a combination of Internet of Things (IoT) local sensing, Edge computing, Cloud storage, web services and Machine Learning (ML) and predictive analytics, continuously monitoring the level of underground water and its quality. Specifically, water level is monitored via an IoT apparatus providing the Static (SWL) and Pumping Water Level (PWL). Moreover, the quality of water is tracked via measuring the Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Oxidation-Reduction Potential (ORP), temperature, pH, electrical-conductivity, etc. Local processing in the IoT device includes measurements’ transformations and robust adaptive control for the device’s actuators. The reservoir dynamics is tracked and modeled using Cloud-based predictive analytics. The corresponding Cloud services include long- and short-term detection of periodic trends, Drawdown (DD) patterns, prediction of SWL, predictive maintenance via PWL tracking, etc. The overall solution has received international recognition in IBM Challenge 2020 as top-7 finalist for Europe. The platform is currently under prototype deployment in several sites in the Attica region of Greece.