IBM and Dublin City University (DCU) have formed a collaborative R&D pilot project to leverage the internet of things (IoT) to help protect our water. The collaboration will focus on newly developed DCU sensor technologies, which have the potential for monitoring several key aspects of water quality at costs significantly lower than technologies currently available. This new generation of sensors, when combined with IBM’s environmental IoT platform, may eventually help provide significant benefits for water management on a global scale.
“Over the next few years, we believe that internet of things technologies will play an important role in helping protect the environment and natural resources,” said Harry Kolar, distinguished engineer, IBM Research. “At IBM Research, we are excited to leverage IBM’s expertise in cognitive and IoT environmental monitoring and management with the DCU Water Institute to help advance the future of water management.”
The first sensors are being deployed on Lake George in New York state where the sensors can help detect subtle trends or early detection of environmental changes that may be crucial to public health and safety or remediation efforts. The integration of IoT solutions with the sensors will help better understand and eventually manage environmental challenges. Some factors to be researched include water quality changes due to natural, artificial, or climate-related effects. Applications may include improved management of pollution from sources such as agricultural or storm water runoff that can affect lakes, rivers, estuaries and marine ecosystems.
“The technologies developed during this important collaboration will aim to disrupt the current norms of costly sensors limiting their distribution at IoT scale to provide really valuable information which supports better decision-making about our valuable water resource,” said Professor Fiona Regan, director of the DCU Water Institute.
