High-Level Project Summary
With the following listed issues, we want to develop a software solution (to track drink water containments) so that it can help to enhance general public awareness of the drinking water quality, and hence lead to help advocating for cleaner drinking water at grassroot level:* Ever growing list of new cocktails of chemicals/particles found in our drinking water such as copper, lead, PFAS and micro-plastics* Lack of awareness from general public and transparency from our utility company about our drinking water quality* Income disparity and oversight of our politicians lead to failure of protecting our drinking water infrastructure
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Blow is a list of functions the project will provide. We want to build some prototype (using Python and/or Java code) and use it as a pilot for try out. If we can put something on people's smartphone to view their local water quality data and explain each containment's adversary health impact in a layman's term, it should be considered the project achieve its purpose (there are two simple UI mockup included in the presentation, and hopefully they can help to visualize the concept a bit better).
* Grassroots method to monitor drinking water quality trend using satellite images (from LandSat) collected by NASA and Water Quality reports published by utility companies
* Developing backend software to periodically scrap new Water Quality reports and new satellite images when they are uploaded to public domain
* Software will correlate the locale specific water quality information from the data collected and feed and display on the Citizen Poseidon Project app based on user selected location
* Developing the Citizen Poseidon Project app with easy understood explanations of each contaminant’s adversary health impact, their safety ranges and recommendations
* The app also shows trend of each compound over period of (past) times, and how it compares with neighboring water district water conditions
Space Agency Data
We got inspiration from the below links referencing NASA LandSat for tracking water quality, we plan to use the satellite images available there to determine regional water quality conditions which will further improve the visibility of water condition to general public beyond their own water district:
http://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/pathfinders/water-quality-data-pathfinder
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-quality-satellites.amp
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016cosp...41E.801H/abstract
Hackathon Journey
This Space Apps hackthon experience was great! Everybody in the team are very excited about the idea when it was first introduced. We all recognized drinking water is an essential part that all living creatures on earth depend on, and if there is something that we can do to monitor/prevent drinking water from further contaminated in a place near us, this project is the perfect opportunity to use to see how grassroot effort can make a difference.
Even though we couldn't get the backend software and smartphone app prototyped during the hackthon, the local judges and hackthon coordinators are all very encouraging and gave us positive feedbacks. That is why we still want to submit the project for judgement at global level. If the project get selected as a winner, it can further help to confirm the worthiness of the idea and maybe catapult to the kick off developing the software.
References
The project builds on using the resources (such as Water Quality Reports that are available to public to see provided from utility companies and satellite images from NASA Landsat that identify the variation in water quality in terms of their optical properties)
Tags
#drinking water #quality