Domestic water consumption monitoring and behaviour intervention by employing the internet of things technologies

Abstract

As the water resource is becoming scarce, conservation of water has a high priority around the globe, study on water management and conservation becomes an important research problem. People are increasingly becoming more individual households, which tend to be less efficient, requiring more resources per capita than larger households. In order to address these challenges, this paper presents the achievements of monitoring domestic water consumption at the appliance level and intervening people's water usage behavior which have been made in ISS-EWATUS (http://www.issewatus.eu), an European Commission funded FP7 project. The water amount consumed by every household appliance is wirelessly recorded with the exact consumption time and stored in a central database. People's water consumption behavior is likely affected by the real-time water consumption awareness, instant practical advices regarding water-saving activities and classification of water consumption behavior for individuals, all of which are provided by a decision support system deployed as a mobile application in a tablet or any other mobile devices. Only the enhanced water consumption awareness is presented in this paper due to the space limitation. The integrated monitoring and decision support system has been deployed and in use in Sosnowiec in Poland and Skiathos in Greece since March 2015. The domestic water consumption monitoring system at appliance level and the local DSS for affecting people's water consumption behavior are innovative and have little seen before according to the knowledge of the authors.