Saaf Water platform using IoT sensors, AI wins $200K prize

About 2 billion people around the world lack access to safely-managed drinking water, and an India-based organization with a technology platform leveraging sensors and AI just won $200,000 in a global coding competition to do something about it.

Saaf Water was announced this week as the top prize winner in the fourth annual Call for Code Global Challenge enabled by founding partner IBM and its creator, David Clark Cause. SaafWater built a groundwater monitoring platform using IBM Cloud and IBM Watson services to address the need for making water quality information accessible and easy to understand, according to a statement.The hardware-software platform, once installed, is designed to monitor groundwater and provide a water quality summary along with suggested purification methods.

In a YouTube video in which it reacted to winning the prize Saaf Water team members explained that the mother of one of their own staffers fell ill for three months after consuming contaminated groundwater, which would not have happened if there had been a warning system in place to alert the community, as well as government authorities.

They described their platform as an “open source IoT AI platform” that uses hardware with multiple water quality sensors that connect via cellular technology to transmit data to the cloud. “We are using artificial intelligence to predict the circumstances in which water quality can go bad,” they said. 

Alerts about poor water quality and suggested purification methods can be sent out to the community via SMS texting, a more viable option than the Internet in areas where many people don’t have immediate access to the Internet, or even a smartphone. The handheld Saaf Water hardware also features an easy-to-understand on-site visual indicator of water quality.

In addition to the financial prize, Saaf Water will receive support from the IBM Service Corps and other expert ecosystem partners to incubate, test, and deploy its solution. The India-based team will also receive assistance from The Linux Foundation to open source its application so developers around the world can improve, scale, and use the technology.

 “The groundwater quality monitoring tool developed by Saaf Water is promising, timely, and appears to have great potential for use by communities relying on groundwater for domestic use,” said Dr. Annapurna Vancheswaran, Managing Director, The Nature Conservancy – India. “This open-source technology could help avoid water-related health risks by indicating unsafe water quality. We certainly Look forward to the tool being scaled up for the benefit of communities.”

In addition to Saaf Water, four other parties that developed climate-related solutions were honored though the Call for Code competition: 

Green Farm, an app to make agriculture more sustainable by, among other things, connecting local producers and consumers to each other, was awarded second place and $25,000.

Project Scavenger, an app to enable individuals to responsibly dispose of their devices, was awarded third place and $25,000.

Honestly, an online browser extension aimed at passing supply chain transparency to consumers, was awarded fourth place and $10,000.

Plenti, a mobile application designed to make inventory tracking and waste measurement processes user-friendly and easy to do at home, was awarded fifth place and $10,000.

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