An Open Source Water Quality Measurement System for Remote Areas

Abstract

The unavailability of safe drinking water leads to poor conditions related to mental and physical health. To quantify the quality of water, laboratories testing the water are present in major cities which assess the basic quality parameters of drinking water, e.g., total dissolved salts (TDS), ion concentration (conductivity), turbidity, and pH value as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). The unavailability of such testing laboratories at remote locations makes the testing of the drinking water difficult. Establishing such laboratories is a tedious job as it requires a lot of costly equipment and specially trained personnel to operate them, making them difficult to handle. To address these issues, a water quality monitoring system for remote areas was designed which is capable of measuring basic measurable qualities of salt concentration, ion concentration, turbidity, and pH value. With the utilization of such a system, the user can qualify the water present in the vicinity as safe or unsafe for drinking purposes. The results from the proposed system are evaluated based on standard testing results and it is found that our water quality monitoring system is in agreement with the standard lab results with an average error of 2.9%, 1.4%, 1.2%, and 1.2% for pH, turbidity, conductivity, and TDS, respectively.