Remote delay tolerant water quality montoring

Monitoring water quality in rivers and treated surface water is crucial to the health and welfare of rural populations. The present research discusses work on the Napo River in the Peruvian Amazon. Several challenges surrounding consistent water quality monitoring exist worldwide. These include resources that must be expended to manually measure water quality, as well as similar resource barriers to retrieve data in remote sensing devices. In this work, we will present a low cost, delay tolerant system that can monitor the quality of the water entering and exiting a water treatment plant. The system is based upon a microcontroller board that can be attached to a multitude of sensors as well to a wireless transmission system that will download water quality data from a multi-gigabyte storage card to a computational device (laptop, smart phone, Ipad) on demand. Readout can occur continuously or at intervals that can be as long as several months, depending on the capacity of the digital camera compatible storage card. Measurement parameters can include, but are not limited to; pH, dissolved oxygen content, electrical conductivity, and temperature. Findings from the development and preliminary testing of this device, as well as reasoning for its use are presented.