KOCHI: To conserve water by reducing wastage and promoting rainwater harvesting, a group of students from the Government Engineering College, Thrissur, have developed a water-level monitoring system.
The mobile application ‘Ecotopia, The Sustainable Village’ was developed by second-year computer science students Neha Susan Manoj, Mariya Thomas, Abil Savio, Gokul Dinesh and Maria Viji George, led by Ajay James, assistant professor of the department.
In the recent global hackathon’, Call for Code Global Challenge, organised by IBM, the students were one of the top nine teams from the country. They are also the only students team from the state to qualify for the final round in the global hackathon.
“We had participated in one of the online hackathons a few months back. Its theme was based on sustainability. Since drought was one of the major issues faced in different parts of the state, we thought of coming up with an innovation that would enable us to monitor the water level in the tanks and also help in its conservation,” says Neha.
There are two IoT-based devices for water monitoring — one placed in the tank and another one in the rainwater storage tank. “The devices placed in the tanks help in measuring the daily, monthly and yearly water consumption. The data is then sent to a loRaWAN gateway and from there it is sent to the cloud. Since loRaWAN uses radio waves, WiFi is not required. The battery also lasts long. The application will help to use water judiciously and educate people about the need to conserve water,” says Neha.
The device placed in tanks will also help in sending alerts to the user in case of leakages.
Though only the prototype has been developed, the students are planning to work on the application on a larger scale after they finish college. The team has also secured the second prize in ‘Envirothon’.