4 ms·
It's a pretty cheap sensor that can potentially detect all sorts of toxins in the water as a supplement to normal water quality analysis. You really can't expec
by Frost1x 6y ago
It's a pretty cheap sensor that can potentially detect all sorts of toxins in the water as a supplement to normal water quality analysis. You really can't expect any sort of reasonable sensor technologies to detect wide ranges of potentially harmful contaminants in water supplies while you can use mussels, clams, etc. as biological sensors--the modern "canary in a coal mine."
I worked with a research project that was sensing, collecting and analyzing types of mussels in rivers that were used as an indirect measurement of water quality in the river. The assumption is that the mussels can act as a proxy for certain contaminants. In fact, they actually filter a lot of water daily so you can occasionally analyze one as to what sort of contaminants it absorbed as a proxy for whats probably in the water.
Meanwhile, water intakes typically only monitor for known and suspected contaminants. They have to rely on other indirect measurements like changes conductivity as a signal to analyze the water and these are noisy and fairly unreliable compositional change detection proxies.
Neat stuff.
- mrlala 6y agoWhat kind of "feedback" do you get from the mussels in a polluted environment? Is it death or something more interesting?
- hrrsn 6y ago>Mussels open the shells and every now and then take in a small amount of water, filtering out everything that is suitable for eating. When the water is polluted, they do their best to separate from it, and everyone’s shells just close at the same time. This happens within two minutes. If two or three clams close, it doesn’t have to mean anything, but if there are eight, it’s an alarm. Then our role is to find out what has upset them so much and find out if it is a real or a false alarm – says Podolski.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- studius 6y agoWhatever it is, it seems like we should put some GPS and transmitters on those clams and put them online.
- girvo 6y agoIoM: Internet of mollusks. I know we’re being tongue in cheek, but I do wonder if there is anyway to actually use them as online sensors without causing too much undue harm?
- AnHonestComment 6y agoWhy not just point a webcam at a bed of them? You can do image analysis to count the shellfish in the image, and attach an “open” or “closed” status to each. Once you have a reliable field of Boolean values, you can detect anomalies in the close count. You could then have a grid of tanks with inlets from the clean water supply and outlets to the sewer where you monitored (more or less real time) the reaction to our clean water supply.
- andylynch 6y agoLooks like they are using magnetic sensors, this would would very simply, similar to the ones on doors for burglar alarms.
- Dwolb 6y agoIf there’s anything I love about working in the IoT space, it’s the variety of applications people work on. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen shrimp farming applications but no mollusks yet.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoThe prototype will be run on shell scripts.
- gibs0ns 6y ago
- DanBC 6y agoSo, slightly different but here's a nice video from Steve Mould about hepatitis being spread around the world by freshwater mussels, which were contaminated when storm drains overflowed into a river, taking sewer effluent with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18