SCC-PG: Community Based Approach to Address Heavy Metal Contamination in Drinking Water using Cloud-Connected Smart Electrochemical Sensors

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Millions of people In the US use drinking water with potentially unsafe levels of heavy metals. Heavy metal contamination of water can be due to leaching of lead and copper from plumbing, anthropogenic activities including mining, industrial and agricultural, among others. In this planning grant engineers, computer scientists, and social scientists will work closely with community stakeholders (residents, community leaders, regulators, utility managers) from the socioeconomically diverse communities of Lowell, Lawrence, Dracut, Westford, and Chelmsford, in Massachusetts, to explore the feasibility of a smart, community-engaged water-quality monitoring and warning system based on user-friendly handheld Electronic Tongue (E-Tongue) devices capable of detecting drinking water contamination. These devices will provide reliable water quality data, and empower citizens to test their own water, aggregate data from their community, and act when a problem is apparent. Cloud-based machine learning algorithms will take the responses from the individual E-Tongue devices and produce predictions about how widespread the problem is, whether the problem is local or systemic, and what other locations may have been contaminated. Further, these predictions would be valuable, for example, in helping to determine which residents in the surrounding area should receive alert notifications to test their own water quality. It could also help notify the local government of the potential need to take action. Through a series of workshops, the project will incorporate and be informed by the perspective of residents in areas such as the effective presentation of the water quality data, privacy concerns community members may have about sharing their water quality data, and the factors that affect the adoption of the technology by the community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.