The prototype  tackles the growing threat of water inconvenience, water scarcity and water pollution.

With the Internet of Water, Flanders aims to roll-out a large-scale permanent sensor network that maps the available water reserves and monitors the water demand at the same time.

The network, will feature more than 1,000 small, wireless low power water quality sensors, developed by Imec, spread around Flanders, that will continuously monitor the quality of soil water, groundwater, surface water and purified sewage water, to better align the available water reserves to the demand.

The pilot project has been launched, starting with the first experiments to examine how measurements can be done accurately, to explore the technical challenges to guarantee the reliability and scalability of a broad network, and to determine how to visualize the data and make them available for the public.

“After several years of intensive research, imec has succeeded to develop a very small sensor that can measure, acidity and conductivity, as well as quantify diverse dissolved substances in the water.  Until now this required a combination of different sensors that could cost up to thousands of euros each,” says Imec’s Marcel Zevenbergen.