Water Quality
Short Leaps
AgRIA (Agri-Tech Research Innovation Accelerator), supported for three years by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), is led by Rothamsted Research in partnership with the University of Hertfordshire, University College London, Cranfield University, Green Triangle, and Rothamsted Enterprises.
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In November 2020, Iknaia was successfully awarded project costs of £50,351 and worked in collaboration with the University of Hertfordshire to create a continuous water quality sensor solution that monitors oxygen levels in fishing ponds/lakes and other environments.
The project identified the best of breed oxygen water sensors and overcome the challenges of power and communications within this challenging environment. The team identified the best data communications, at the lowest cost, in order to send data to a cloud hosted server and present onto a frontend dashboard, in real-time.
The data enabled lake owners and environmental agencies to continuous monitor oxygen levels in lakes and rivers. At the same time, the system generated alerts signalling any drop in oxygen levels that could be harmful to fish and other wildlife and intervention could be made.
Julia McNally, CEO of Iknaia says ;
“The idea behind this initial R&D phase was to demonstrate that we could create a continuous monitoring solution, initially for fishing lakes. Going forward this solution could be used to monitor all sorts of water quality in other environments such as farmers fields, railside gulleys etc and extend to far reaching countries such as Africa where over 358million people lack safe water.”“It was fantastic to work with the talented academic team at University of Hertfordshire, the timescales were tight for this type of development, but the team worked tirelessly to finish the project within the deadlines”.