785 million people, or 1 in 10 in the world, are without clean water, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
When a water pump fails, many people in rural communities must walk several miles to a neighbouring water system just to access clean drinking water. What’s more, repairing these systems can be complicated and inefficient, as there is no visibility when the pumps break down.
Since 2006, the non-profit charity: water has provided clean, safe drinking water to more than 11 million people in 29 countries. The organization builds sustainable, community-owned water projects.
charity: water developed a remote cloud-connected sensor device to monitor the performance of clean water projects located in developing regions. Specifically, 3,000 first-generation Internet of Things (IoT) sensors were retrofitted on water points to track the operational functionality of systems installed in northern Ethiopia. The sensors transmit hourly real-time water flow data to the cloud-based tracking system.
Over four years, the organization captured more than 32 million data points, but didn’t have the tools to analyze them and struggled to filter out the “noise” in the data – and knew that harnessing this data could improve the scale and reliability of its services.