To address the issue of contaminated drinking water, the continuous, real-time, in situ monitoring of the river water for pollutants is an important step. This would help in finding out the point sources for preventative action, providing real-time alerts to stakeholders for taking precautionary measures, and systematic modelling and analysis with historical data for formulating effective policies for long-term actions. Based on the above objectives, Amrita University is developping an autonomous, perpetual, innovative, floating sensor system that collects the data from specific locations and from multiple locations by moving along with the water flow, with an integrated energy harvesting system using solar PV, or the flow-induced vibration-based power generation system, and batteries, resource-aware data collection and management processes, heterogeneous communication interfaces to transmit the signals through the multi-level communication hierarchy to a cloud server for data reception, storage, analysis, intelligent decision making, and notification. For this project the students identified the appropriate sensors, proposed a first design and assembled a prototype.
