Piloting Status of the Location-enabled LEDSOL Solution for Access to Clean Water in Africa

Abstract This is a work-in-progress paper presenting the current status of the transnational LEDSOL (”Enabling clean and sustainable water through smart UV/LED disinfection and SOLar energy utilization”) project and system, which integrates an UV/LED-based water disinfection unit with a positioning engine for location-enabled features and with a solar-cell-based power source. The prototype has already been tested with water from three lakes in Romania and the piloting has just started in Algeria and Togo and will have a static-testing phase and a dynamictesting phase. The water purification unit comprises a particle filter, an active carbon filter and a disinfection unit consisting of three UV/LED tubes. The disinfection unit has already shown very good water purification capability. In terms of location engines, two apps have been used to collect data from Android mass-market devices: the GNSSLogger app provided by Google and a MIMIR app developped by Tampere University team; only the former one has been so far used to collect data from Africa. In addition, a GNSS constellation simulator has been developped in Matlab in order to be able to model various GNSS-related parameters. These features are to be further integrated as Location-Based Service (LBS) into the LEDSOL portable water disinfection system for real-time monitoring and alerts, optimized routing and deployment of the water portable units, as well as collecting and analyzing data on water quality and usage patterns across different locations. This paper also shows some snapshot results obtained with our simulator and three tracks collected from three locations in Africa, in Togo, Algeria, and Tanzania. The further integration efforts and the next steps in LEDSOL project are also discussed.