DAIAD: Democratizing water monitoring

11-04-2014

DAIAD is an FP7-funded research project developing technologies for real-time monitoring, analysis, and understanding of water consumption data, aiming to induce sustainable changes in consumer behavior.

Reductions in energy consumption through ICT are considered a mainstream with well documented and proven benefits. Timely and accurate information, interlinked with human activities, is valuable for reducing resource consumption on a personal level. In contrast, water consumption largely remains unaffected by these advances, in an archaic state. Simple water meters delivering aggregated consumption through printed bills every few months, is the norm for the vast majority of consumers.

In DAIAD, we will democratize water monitoring, empowering consumers with low cost, inclusive technologies, enabling to gain actionable insights for their water consumption, self-inducing sustainable changes in their water use.

DAIAD will develop low-cost monitoring sensors for residential settings, providing real-time and highly detailed water consumption data, in addition to effective feedback interfaces to accurately and timely inform consumers for their water consumption. Further, we will develop Big Data management, integration, and analysis services for real-time water consumption data, enabling their correlation with relevant Big and Open data sources towards exploring, designing and validating Water Demand Management strategies. Extensive real-world user trials will be performed to test and validate the project’s technologies and to generate data offering novel insight concerning the parameters influencing water demand. Based on this information, we will validate the benefits regarding the reduction in water consumption and its sustainability as a result of the project’s technologies, and also propose novel Water Demand Management and pricing strategies to induce sustainable consumer changes on a wider scale.

More information for DAIAD is available on our first press release.