Responding to the water disaster in India and its rising sanitation necessities, a 30-year-old PhD student on the Division of Biosciences and Bioengineering in IIT Guwahati has lately advanced a singular and inexpensive Web of Issues (IoT)-enabled water high quality tracking tool.
Satyam, who best is going through his first title, is a resident of Ranchi, Jharkhand, and the son of a retired state govt worker. His tool prices roughly Rs 12,000, a stark distinction to current built-in water high quality gadgets from all over the world that price greater than Rs 2 lakhs and don’t seem to be IoT-enabled.
Referred to as the R-SAM-PRO, this tool received the ‘Very best Product Design’ award beneath the Water and Sanitation class on the Vishwakarma Awards 2023 organised past due ultimate month through IIT-Delhi in partnership with Maker Bhavan Basis and the WIN Basis.
The tool stood out for its talent to comprehensively deal with the essential water and sanitation wishes with technological innovation, “integrating IoT, more than one sensors, and AI readiness for complex water high quality tracking,” consistent with a press unlock issued through IIT-Guwahati.
Going additional, the discharge explains, “The gadget’s real-time knowledge provision is the most important for environmental conservation and useful resource control. Its affordability and user-friendly design make it extremely obtainable, with possible for common adoption, particularly in resource-limited settings, considerably improving water high quality tracking practices.”
Addressing water air pollution
Satyam finished his grasp’s in biotechnology from IIT-Roorkee prior to continuing to his PhD at IIT-Guwahati beneath the steering of Professor Sanjukta Patra.
Chatting with The Higher India, he explains the incentive in the back of growing this distinctive tool, “In a rustic like India, the place a big inhabitants is living alongside many water our bodies, the will for real-time sensing of water parameters turns into extra pressing. Operating from water tension to water well being and water availability is the motive force (in the back of this innovation).”
He provides, “Through offering an economical, multi-parametric, IoT-enabled answer, we goal to empower communities and government with the equipment wanted for efficient water useful resource control and remediation.”
He discovered that whilst running with one in every of his PhD goals — the place he was once that specialize in the improvement of a complicated bio-oxidation gadget for water remediation — he realised that there have been very restricted multiparametric gadgets to be had to promptly test the standard of water in real-time.
“This motivated me to channel my efforts into growing an answer that might no longer best support in my analysis but in addition serve the wider neighborhood through offering an inexpensive, real-time, and multi-parametric water high quality tracking device,” he provides.
How does it paintings?
The important thing options of this IoT-enabled real-time water tracking gadget come with:
● Built-in GPS: Allows exact location monitoring of water high quality metrics.
● Various Sensors: Measures turbidity, Overall Dissolved Solids (TDS), oxygen ranges, temperature, and drive for a complete water high quality research.
● ESP32 Microprocessor: Powers the tool with environment friendly processing and verbal exchange functions.
● Hybrid Energy Device: Guarantees adaptability to other environments, lowering reliance on a unmarried energy supply.
● AI Integration: Designed to include synthetic intelligence, improving knowledge research and predictive functions.
● Complicated Information Retrieval: Streamlines get right of entry to to gathered knowledge for user-friendly interactions with more than a few stakeholders.
Chatting with The Higher India, Satyam explains, “The R-SAM-PRO is in keeping with a microprocessor. It has a collection of sensors for TDS (overall dissolved solids), turbidity, dissolved oxygen, GPS, temperature, and drive, along an extra sensor for part space humidity tracking. Upon activation, those sensors relay knowledge to the microprocessor, which processes and securely transmits it to a real-time database.”
Customers can get right of entry to this information thru a user-friendly console, visualising it in graphical or tabular codecs and monitoring the sensor’s location. The tool’s “hybrid energy control gadget” guarantees its operational longevity throughout day and evening cycles, making it flexible for more than a few packages, from municipal water tracking to business wastewater remedy.
“The paintings is safe through a patent,” he says.
Going additional, he provides, “The tool leverages the IoT for seamless verbal exchange between gadgets and cloud-based databases, considerably improving its software and accessibility. The huge knowledge gathered can be utilized to coach AI fashions to are expecting water high quality permutations, offering precious insights for each native populations and business settings.”
“As IoT and AI applied sciences advance, they promise to revolutionise our working out and control of water assets and sanitation. For instance, in keeping with skilled knowledge it will probably are expecting pre and post-monsoon water parameters vary,” he explains.
What makes this tool so inexpensive?
Chatting with The Higher India, Satyam notes, “The fee aid of our tool to Rs 12,000 is an important fulfillment when in comparison to equivalent merchandise from world corporations like YSI, Hanna, and WTW, that are priced between Rs 97,000 and Rs 2,63,000. The top prices of those competing merchandise may also be attributed to elements similar to import tasks, restricted after-sales enhance, and top operational bills as those merchandise don’t seem to be made in India.”
“Our technique to bringing down prices concerned the usage of industrial-grade water sensors and leveraging Google’s unfastened internet web hosting and real-time database products and services. This strategic selection no longer best made our tool inexpensive but in addition built-in it with state of the art IoT functions. We advanced this product in-house on the Enzyme and Microbial Generation Lab,” he provides.
Demanding situations in growing the tool
Within the preliminary levels of construction, Satyam, his mentor and co-workers encountered demanding situations associated with energy distribution, weight balancing, and keeping up a compact design.
To handle those problems, they made a number of changes, together with redesigning the case and the outer construction to enhance buoyancy.
“We additionally built-in a 20,000 mAh top staying power battery to make sure longer operational instances when solar energy isn’t in use. Additional refinements had been made to toughen the sleek processing and show of information, in the end overcoming the preliminary demanding situations,” he notes.
The adventure from thought to the present prototype spanned 4 years. Via successive iterations, they’ve subtle the tool, expanding the selection of monitored water parameters.
“Our present style represents the 3rd prototype with plans to extend its functions additional,” he says.
Having a look forward
Up to now, Satyam claims that he has won one invitation from a startup and every other from a big Indian corporate to scale up manufacturing of this tool.
“However we’re nonetheless refining this tool every day and making plans to get a hold of new variations with added options. The venture lately receives enhance from the Spring EU India venture, the WIN Basis (a US-based nonprofit), and the Maker Bhavan Basis. Even if including extra sensors would possibly somewhat build up the tool’s worth, we goal to stay it beneath Rs 20,000 with new added options (R-SAM model 2). Scaling up production is expected to cut back prices, probably making the tool much more inexpensive,” he says.
In the meantime, Professor Sanjukta Patra of the Division of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IIT Guwahati, additionally notes, “It’s been a exceptional adventure witnessing Satyam’s determination and innovation in growing the IoT-enabled water tracking gadget. His venture, a beacon of technological development, displays a deep working out of the demanding situations confronted in water useful resource control, specifically in growing international locations. The gadget’s affordability, accessibility, and real-time knowledge transmission functions don’t seem to be only a testomony to his technical prowess but in addition his dedication to societal betterment.”
(Edited through Padmashree Pande; Photographs courtesy IIT-Guwahati)