...Biotsphere is addressing the vitally important issues affecting UK inland waterways, lakes and rivers. None of the rivers in England meet the legal standard for health. The main reason is that sewage, farm, urban and industrial pollution is so widespread that all of England’s rivers failed to meet the legal standard for overall health the last time they were assessed. In addition to the threat from pollution, the UK’s chalk streams are under threat from over abstraction and agricultural run-off.
The impact is clear to swimmers, boaters, anglers and anyone who would prefer to stroll alongside a shining stream rather than a polluted river, indeed the impact also affect industry, agriculture and aquaculture. And the effects are getting more widespread as the environment both adjacent and within the water course is threatened and loses its vitality.
Biotsphere has now applied the ubiquitous and low cost IoT technologies to assessing the quality of water within lakes, rivers and streams, providing individuals, communities, water consumers, industrial and agricultural groups with an independent resource to monitor and respond to changes in the quality of the water environment.
Biotsphere's approach is ...
- Take the 'lab to the river' - rather than rely on in-frequent manual sampling
- Use machine learning and AI technologies to predict polution events and allow for prompt action
- Open source all environmental data for the benefit of the public and agencies
Technology
Biotsphere delivers low cost and robust water quality measurement solutions through novel use of widely available IoT, Cloud and mobile technologies.
- The Internet of Things (IoT) technologies provides a basis for creating solution to capture a wide variety of water quality indicators and record and transmit this data using open and well supported standards to robust Cloud platforms or to existing customer specific on-premise systems.
- Cloud platforms Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google can all be supported enabling the leveraging of wide range of storage, analytic, alerting and learning solutions to be built and customised to specific customer needs. The use of cloud technologies allows flexible and adaptive solutions to be created that scale to meet the variable needs of environmental monitoring.
- Underpinning the use of IoT and Cloud technologies is the use of widely available and ubiquitous mobile technologies, with Biotsphere providing solution that can utilise WiFi,3G/4G or LoRAWAN infrastructure and standards depending upon availability and bandwidth needs.
Monitoring
Measuring water health and identifying threats needs a wide range of measures backed up by detailed data analysis.
- The Biotsphere platform supports a wide range of configurations and sensors options, combined with flexible storage and communications capabilities.
- Sensors supported as standard are currently pH, Turbidity, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) , Temperature , Dissolved Oxygen , flow , river depth and local atmospheric conditions. Future developments will include options for spectroscopic and acoustic analysis.
- Sensor signals are filtered and amplified before being stored locally and transmitted using standard protocols MQTT, SFTP, HTTPS over mobile communications infrastructures for example 3G/4G/WiFi or LoRAWAN.
Consultancy
Consulting and Services
- Technical and Architectural - 20+ years experience gained in delivery of solutions across wide range in industries and market segments. IoT is core to our product delivery and this combined with Cloud technologies allied to Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities offers unprecedented opportunities.
- Project Management - All aspect of Agile project development and delivery, through initiation, planning, development , production and release.
- Systems Integration, Solution and Product Design - Rapid prototyping, agile development and solution design through to initial production, deployment and integration of end-to-end environmental monitoring and alerting products and systems.
Live Data Feed
Biotsphere provide real time display of key indicators of water quality. The graphs below display a subset of indicators, which are available as open data sources for display using many open dashboard tools.