In order to test the Waternomics Platform in a real life situation and in combination with other smart applications, Waternomics installed sensors and a demo application in the Smartest House in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Already on day one the application proved its use: based on the detailed meter readings it was concluded that there was a leakage in the water network.
Smartest House in the Netherlands
Smart Homes is an expert centre on smart technology and smart living. This includes areas like eHealth, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and energy management. The philosophy behind Smart Homes is that ‘Home Automation & Smart Living’ needs to be experienced before one can fully understand the possibilities that if offers. That is why they build the Smartest House of the Netherlands, a unique tool to make experiential design a reality. The house is used permanently and hosts a range of applications, like energy generating windows, social robots and avatars stimulating behavioral change, which all use the same open infrastructure.
Smart water application
Waternomics started with installing one sensor at the main entrance of the water network. More sensors will be installed in a later stage, for example in the kitchen and the bathroom, to see how fine-grained the sensor network must be in order to detect individual applications like a toilet, washing machine, dishwasher or garden hose. The sensor reads the water flow every 3 seconds and sends the data to a cloud server, where it is stored together with the water usage data of the four pilots in Greece, Italy and Ireland. The application in the kitchen uses this data to show total water use, average water use and abnormalities in water use to the occupants of the house. During the project, new functionalities will be added to the application. When the sensor and application where installed, it showed an unexpected flow of water. No taps where open and no water using devices where active.
