KNUST students develop an application that reads the water bill on the phone | Social

Water distribution companies and customers have sometimes had to argue because they think they are being deceived.

Although research has shown that meter readers sometimes make mistakes, households can not exonerate from the perceived overconsumption of water.

Fortunately, an intelligent prepaid water counting system developed by computer science students from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology is intended to reduce the operating costs of distribution companies of water and to guarantee prompt payment of water bills.

A 2008 study found that water use in Kumasi ranged from 177 liters per day for high-income households to 70 liters for low-income households with continuous water supply. According to the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the rational use of water involves the use of improved technologies and practices that provide equal or better service with less water.

It is also worrying that low income households are less able to invest in water saving measures.

The final year students Awudi Eric Okyere, Quarm Sylvanus and Ebenezer Azumah with the supervisor and Benjamin Kommey decided to design a meter to measure the volume of water consumed electronically, to synchronize the meter recording remotely , follow and update the measurement data.

"We wanted to design a meter that allows users to track water usage using an app, and water companies can track all meters deployed around the world," Ebenezer Azumah said. The system includes a web application, hardware, a processor and a mobile application.

When the water begins to circulate in the meter, it sends pulses to the controller and, once this calculation is done, it sends them to the remote server. The remote server calculates the bill and provides a real-time graph of meter consumption and throughput.

"When you're not there and the water overflows, the plot will tell you that the water is still flowing, which means that the faucet has been opened or that it's There is a problem with the meter, "Quarm Sylvanus said. The mobile application uses mobile money to make a payment for the water consumed.

"The customer can see the list of all payments and the method and the customer can make a payment by entering the phone number, the identifier and the amount," added Awudi Eric Okyere.

The innovators have announced that they would incorporate an artificial intelligence badysis that will allow the billing system to study usage patterns, intelligently forecast bills and recommend action plans. efficiency enabling users to achieve their goals.

Users will be able to detect leaks and remotely close the water supply to homes to prevent escalation of bills and water wastage.

The utility provider will also be able to use the system to intelligently detect leaks with the distribution system. This will speed up their reaction times to treat water leaks and reduce waste along the distribution line.

In addition to the obvious application of this innovation by utility providers such as Ghana Water Company Ltd, innovators say there is also potential application in community water systems and irrigation systems. They say that this will be helpful in the current One Village One Dam government project, where water supplied to various farms from one source of irrigation could be smartly measured and accounted for.