Going with the flow
How IoT technology provides life-saving water and freezes out H20 bandits
Water is essential for survival. For this reason, many humanitarian organizations spend millions of dollars each year on water distribution in disaster settings. Safe, clean water is trucked into communities where people have escaped war, survived earthquakes and live in shelters that lack basic infrastructure — there’s no other way to get it.
Too much of this water never reaches the people it’s intended for, thanks to waste, fraud and abuse that can go unchecked during the delivery process. How can we prevent this?
Manual monitoring methods in the trucks don’t always provide the most accurate water level measurement at any given time. This is made more difficult in some hard-to-reach locations where supervision is challenging. Manual monitoring also makes it harder for aid workers to stay accountable to their donors and beneficiaries.
“There are regular internal investigations into water trucking by major aid agencies, including NRC, because of the difficulties of monitoring water quantity accurately, the importance of water to beneficiaries and the large amounts of money involved,” said Gareth Lewis, a shelter and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) specialist. “Despite these investigations and tightening our manual monitoring, we are still unable to accurately track exactly how much water is being delivered. So here is a big scope for hidden losses, which hurts the people we’re trying to help.”
Lewis works for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has a presence in more than 30 countries — and relies on water distribution investigative units. “Even if we could save a little bit a little bit each month we could save tens of thousands of dollars a year that could be saved and used for other aid efforts,”he said. “Getting real-time, accurate data will allow us to improve not only our accountability but will also make our operations more responsive. We would be able to more quickly identify leakages, delayed trucks, or water quality problems and know exactly where they occurred, allowing us to solve them in a matter of hours rather than weeks.”
In these situations, innovation has to meet the needs on the ground.
#WaterGoals
Syria has been completely devastated by nearly a decade of war, with 6.1 million Syrians forced to flee their homes. To supply water to those housed in refugee camps or loose settlements the NRC spends about $3 million each year — which is typically supplied by contractors who provide some 30,000 cubic meters of water each month. The organization’s staff visits the camps to monitor the deliveries, photographing every water truck and using a simple pool meter to test the water quality. This is a time-consuming and onerous task with limited accuracy. Despite preventive measures, a fraction of total water supplied inevitably gets lost in the process.
Enter Field Ready, the global humanitarian aid non-governmental organization that uses technology and innovation to transform logistics, design and manufacture on-the-ground solutions in disaster-affected areas and engage people in new ways. With support provided by the British government’s Frontier Technology Livestreaming program, Field Ready has partnered with the NRC to design, test and provide technical support for a solution to these water quality issues.
The goal of this partnership is to meet the needs of conflict-affected Syrians by using design and on-the-ground local production to assure water quality. The organizations are piloting the use of locally made water monitoring devices placed on water trucks to collect data about the delivered water and improve water truck monitoring.
Field Ready will work closely with the NRC to identify the challenges encountered and design a workable solution. In the next phase, testing will take place in Jordan where a small batch of devices will be produced. Once installation is complete, Field Ready staff will provide technical support to ensure the design works and that any lessons learned are captured. Training for the NRC staff will also be provided along with a short instruction manual.
Recognizing that this is a common innovation challenge in many contexts where the NRC works, Field Ready will also be available to help scale these solutions in other countries. Obtaining better data in an automated way is a problem that exists not just for the NRC and its water deliveries, but is shared across humanitarian and development sectors. We believe that solving this problem with locally engineered, robust, simple ”Internet of Things” devices such as these water sensors have the potential to unlock large-scale, systemic change.
Getting the inside story
Lewis, who previously worked for a water company, knew that tracking distribution accurately was possible — if water tanks that didn’t move were tracked. “We knew that adding water sensors to pipes and water tanks in a water treatment plant was common,” he said. “However, putting them on a truck which spends all day bouncing along muddy tracks is a different story. If sensors could be robust enough to work on moving trucks and be fitted with GPS systems to provide us with their location at regular intervals, then they could feed us data that would pinpoint exactly where water losses occurred.”
The sensors needed for the job, however, didn’t exist — so Field Ready set out to create them. “If we embedded these ‘Internet of Things’ sensors in trucks carrying water into camps, then we could collect real-time, accurate and consistent data that would enhance accountability and decision-making,” said Field Ready Executive Director Eric James. “We just need to start by creating a minimal viable product, which is a simple yet workable solution. It’s a great approach to solving the problem of water loss.”
Field Ready assigned Dave Rice, an experienced researcher and entrepreneur, to lead the research and development. Rice had already co-invented a super-sensitive sensor that detects viruses, bacteria and other contaminants in a water supply. His experience told him that a flow switch attached to the pump’s outlet could send data to a data-logger mounted in the tanker.
In this system, the data collected includes the time that delivery started, duration of delivery and volume of water delivered. At the end of the trip the tanker would stop near the building where a PC was installed and the data from all the deliveries transmitted. The PC receives this data and displays the results as an Excel spreadsheet.
Deciding what kind of switch to use took some trial and error. “At first, a pressure switch was used, but bumps in the road caused the water to change the pressure when it was being transported — that led to erroneous readings,” Rice said. “We wanted to measure the water when it was flowing out, so the answer was a flow switch, which would be triggered only when the water was flowing out and could give precise measurements.”
The diameter of the hose used to pump the water during delivery was also an issue, noted Rice. ”This effect was taken advantage of because the flow-rate was mostly determined by the length of the hose and its diameter,“ he said. ”It would be fairly constant, although different for each tanker and hose combination.”
Sticking with concepts being pioneered by Field Ready in humanitarian settings, the system is easy to use, robust and engineered to be entirely locally made. For example, calibration for each tanker requires only a tape measure and watch. Water is pumped for about a minute and then the change in water levels is measured. Using these numbers allows the volume of water delivered to be calculated. “It’s not at all difficult to do,” Rice said.
Rice even figured out an ingenious workaround for sharing the bespoke software. Executable software is hard to transfer via email, unlike when it’s downloaded from a website. When users request software, an email account is created for them and the software is sent to that account. The password is given to the user and they upload the software from the account’s “sent” file.
It’s all in the results
The impact of the approach will be two-fold: 1) it will help the NRC improve the accuracy of its water monitoring for conflict-affected Syrians, and 2) it will develop a means to scale this to other areas. Ultimately, this will result in improved health outcomes, reduced costs and increased effectiveness.
While Rice spent countless hours developing the solution, building it in the field is simple and inexpensive. The electronics for each device cost less than $45 USD and can be built entirely by hand. The device is well suited to areas where labor is less expensive than parts, hooks up to any car battery and will work with any PC.
Many of the parts can be substituted easily and the files with machine instructions describing how the boards are manufactured can be shared as needed. Any intellectual property created as a result of this project will be under a Creative Commons open-source license or equivalent.
Getting to this first sprint is really just the starting block for the solution. “It’s just the beginning of what we can do,” James said. “Once we know more about the challenges locally, the designs can be tweaked appropriately right there and shared with everyone so we can keep improving and ultimately solve the problem on a global scale.”
