2015 IEEE 4th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE)

Internet of Things (IoT) Enabled Water

Monitoring System
Thinagaran Perumal1, 1Md Nasir Sulaiman, 2Leong.C.Y
1
Universiti Putra Malaysia, Emails: {thinagaran, nasir}@upm.edu.my
2
Catrino, Malaysia, Email: ylchui12@gmail.com

Abstract- Water is always a crucial part of everyday life.
Due to global environmental situation, water management and
conservation is vital for human survival. In recent times, there
were huge needs of consumer based humanitarian projects
that could be rapidly developed using Internet of Things (IoT)
technology. In this paper, we propose an IoT based water
monitoring system that measures water level in real-time. Our
prototype is based on idea that the level of the water can be
very important parameter when it comes to the flood
occurrences especially in disaster prone areas. A water level
sensor is used to detect the desired parameter, and if the water
level reaches the parameter, the signal will be feed in real-
time to social network like Twitter. A cloud server was
configured as data repository. The measurement of the water
levels are displayed in remote dashboard.
Keywords—Water Monitoring; IoT; Smart home.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent times, development in computing and
consumer electronics technologies have triggered
Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Internet of Things
(IoT) is described as enabler that links seamless objects
surrounding the environment and performs some sort of
message exchange among them. The Internet of Things
(IoT) is a collection of objects that work jointly in order
to serve consumer tasks in a federated manner [1] [2]. It
binds computational power to deliver data about the
surrounding environments [3] [4]. These devices can be
in form of bespoke sensors, appliances, embedded
systems, and data analysis microchips. Figure 1 below
depicts the main components of an IoT system.
One of the rapid influences of IoT is on the field of
environmental monitoring, especially on disaster
management, early warning systems as well as
environmental data analytics. One of the significant
issues in an environmental monitoring is water
monitoring and sustainability. In consumer perspectives,
water monitoring and conservation is an important
utility service that often faced with many challenges.
For example, in the case of flood disaster, a water
monitoring system is vital, as it can give a prior alert to
nearby residents to perform some action like evacuation,
contingency planning and so forth. In this paper we
propose an IoT based water monitoring system in real-
time scenario. The proposed solution is low cost, with
integrated sensory system that allows inner monitoring
of water quality. Alerts and relevant data are
transmitted over the Internet to a cloud server and can
be received by user terminal owned by consumers. The
outcome of the water measurement is displayed in web-
based remote dashboard. A Twitter handle is also
incorporated as part of the alert system. This system
may be used equally efficiently by home-owners as by
industrial users and other water utilities. The system can
provide a pervasive early warning system for portable
water quality through the Internet of Things. The
outline of the paper is as follow. Section 2 discusses the
prototype implementation and followed by Section 3 on
experimental results. Finally, the paper is concluded in
Section 4.
II. PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION

The IoT based water system is deployed using 2

different IoT sensors (i.e. ultrasonic, water sensor) by
ŶǀŝƌŽŶŵĞŶƚ applying IEEE802.11 communication standards. The
data transmission of those sensors is done by integrating
a wireless gateway within the consumer network.
^ĞŶƐŽƌ WŽǁĞƌ tŝƌĞůĞƐƐ Figure 2 below shows the system diagram of the
ĐƚƵĂƚŽƌ ^ŽƵƌĐĞƐ ŽŶŶĞĐƚŝǀŝƚLJ proposed system

ůŽƵĚŽŵƉƵƚŝŶŐĂŶĚŶĂůLJƚŝĐƐ

Fig.1. IoT system components [2]

978-1-4799-8751-1/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 86


Fig.2. System diagram of IoT based
monitoring system
A controller board based on the ATmega328P was
deployed for the prototype design. The board consist of
14 digital I/O pins (of which 6 was used as PWM
outputs), in addition with 6 analog inputs, a USB
connection, and a power input source. In the proposed
system, ultrasonic sensors are configured to determine
the distance between the sensors and the water level in a
tank. The sensor sends out the wave and reflected and
transmits the data into LCD, display the distance in
centimeter. A bespoke cloud server is deployed to host
the water data analytics schema that manages the entire
water monitoring system. The server collects the water
monitoring data forwarded by the gateway and store in
a database for analytics as well as displaying them in
web-based dashboard. Data collection for the system is
configured in terms of timestamp, days and week in the
web-based dashboard. The system implementation of
the proposed design is illustrated in Figure 2 below:
Fig.3. Prototype of the IoT based water monitoring system
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The IoT based water monitoring data are analyzed to
measure their performance metric in terms of accuracy
as well as response time. The total response time taken
to complete one cycle of sensor feed is 126ms. A total
of 500 readings were sampled in this work. During the
experimental design, the distance between the water and
ultrasonic is converted into centimeters (cm). For
benchmark and indicators, three levels of indicators are
classified which are Safe level (distance greater than
45.0cm), Not Safe level (distance between 35.0cm and
45.0cm) and Danger level (distance less than 35.0cm).
Both Not Safe level and Danger level will trigger the
LED and subsequently update the results on web-based
dashboard. Higher water level will indicate as danger
level and trigger the buzzer alarm configured as part of
the proposed system. Figure 4 below shows the result of
the water level detection on distance versus time taken
during the sampling periods.
water
60.00
50.00
40.00
Distance (cm)
30.00
20.00
10.00
0.00
1 28 55 82 109 136 163
Time (s)
Fig.4. Water Level Detection
The results in Figure 4 above shows a linear correlation
between distanced measured (i.e. water level) and time
taken for the water level indications. The result clearly
indicates the reliability of the system in providing
consistency reading throughout the sampling period.
IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In the future, the ultra-sonic sensor could be replaced by
precise water level sensor, so that the system can
perform more reliably and gives higher accuracy of
water level detection reading. Further improvisation
would developing a custom dashboard using mobile app
would be ideal for such application in consumer
networks. 
REFERENCES
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