Water Usage Monitor

“People don’t have water systems, but they do have smartphones. It’s just the way things have developed.”

Throughout the world, millions of people are still without clean water. Life Giving Water International – a Christian nonprofit – is working to help solve this problem by installing and maintaining water systems for those in need. Managing these systems can be tedious especially due to the limited access to certain locations.

This is the senior project of Jacob Westra and Ben Tanis, for CS 396/8 in Calvin University’s Department of Computer Science.

Vision

LGWI has requested an application to help the management of these systems and their functionality. This project will mainly focus on tracking the water usage of pumps that have been installed in rural communities in Ecuador. This app will calculate and measure water usage for individual homes, to accurately charge customers.

On the client-side, we want a computer vision image-to-text algorithm to scan the meters and calculate the total charge for each household. This data will be parsed into .csv files, and stored in the cloud via Firebase. Once Firebase reaches capacity, we intend for the data to be backed up to LGWI’s own server.

We will be collaborating with Mark DeHaan and Chris Visscher, both civil engineers who work full time with LGWI in Ecuador. They are both very passionate about clean water systems and providing clean water services for those in need. Mark is a Calvin alum who studied Civil and Environmental Engineering, and has been involved with the organization since last year.

People

Students

Advisors

Jacob Westra

Jacob Westra is a senior studying computer science from Holland, MI. Jacob is an avid enjoyer of the great outdoors, and spent this last summer as a camp counselor at Camp Roger. Jacob is primarily doing backend work for this project.

Ben Tanis

Ben Tanis, a Senior Computer Science, took interest in the LGWI monitor due to its practical impact for communities in Ecuador. Ben is from Harrisburg, PA and in his free time, enjoys lifting and board games with friends. For the application Ben is focusing on the front-end aspects.

Mark DeHaan

Life Giving Water International

Keith Vander Linden

Calvin Department of Computer Science

Future Work

Our original plan was to use a text-recognition algorithm to read the number from the camera, once it had been pointed at a meter. We’d love to incorporate this in the future, which would make data entry much easier for the user. Additionally, there are a lot of Android- or iOS-specific bugs that need smoothing out. We’d love to see a team of future students pick up this project.