H2Oolkit

H2Oolkit - Water Source Detection

Our team consists of 4 members, all with different roles:

Bojan Matei - Project Manager

Fulop Peter-Attila - Frontend Developer

Marcu Dominik-Andrei - Backend Engineer

Szilagyi David - Full Stack Developer

The Problem - Less than half of rural Romanian settlements have stable access to drinkable water. Most of the time, they need to get it by themselves, which often comes with difficulties. There are initiatives to build the required infrastructure for many of these villages, but it takes a lot of time to develop the solution, because the acquirement and processing of the relevant data is rarely efficient.

Our idea is to detect springs and other water bodies in remote and isolated muontainside villages, where accessing water is difficult. We use this data to find the most efficient way to supply them with drinkable water using these natural sources. We also map these sources and provide useful information for the organizations tasked with developing these supply lines. This way, we aim to provide equitable access to water for roughly 2000 villages in Romania.

In order to achieve this, we process the datasets given by the Sentinel-satellites of Copernicus. Using this data, we detect indices of springs and we calculate the probability that in that place there is indeed a spring. The places with high enough probability will be assigned a feasibility score that is calculated based on factors such as distance and slope between the intended point of collection. We provide a plan outline for the pipeline project, and also a downloadable PDF report which gives more details to our customers.

Speaking of customers, we mainly plan to cooperate with public organizations such as local authorities, or private ones such as water companies. We plan to sell our licenses to them to use the application. We believe that this data is of utmost value to engineers of projects, as they work most efficiently with quick and precise data resources. The work of authorities would also become significantly easier as they make efforts to help their villagers access clean drinkable water.

We also have many directions in which we aim to improve in the future. These include modernization plans such as AI and ML integration, but also extending our reach to more areas in need. Moreover, we plan to tackle the time factor by further implementing source monitoring which keeps an eye on the springs and alerts if it is beginning to dry up.