Designing an economical system to detect escherichia coli bacteria colonies in remote locations for water quality assessment

Water is an essential and a life sustaining drink to humans and is also important for survival of most other organisms and hence its quality needs to be monitored regularly to assure that it´s safe to use. Potable water is a cause of concern in many developing countries including India. Presently we have fine and accurate quality assessment techniques as far as the chemical parameters of water quality are concerned but when it comes to the bacteriological parameters we are still way behind from some of the other countries. Escherichia coli, is the most common serotype of enter hemorrhagic bacteria that are responsible for numerous food borne and water borne infections globally. This paper deals with detection of e coli bacteria in per ml water sample for which we have made a system comprising of an incubator chamber required for optimal growth of bacteria, e coli is grown on a petrifilm which is a dehydrated form of agar containing appropriate nutrients for e coli growth. Finally we will use image processing algorithm to detect bacterial colonies on the petrifilm and detect it remotely by using MATLAB Mobile which is an Android based cloud application for MATLAB on smartphones via GPRS.