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Early warning smartphone diagnostics for water security and analysis using real-time pH mapping

Photonic Sensors volume 5, pages 289–297 (2015)Cite this article

Abstract

Early detection of environmental disruption, unintentional or otherwise, is increasingly desired to ensure hazard minimization in many settings. Here, using a field-portable, smartphone fluorimeter to assess water quality based on the pH response of a designer probe, a map of pH of public tap water sites has been obtained. A custom designed Android application digitally processed and mapped the results utilizing the global positioning system (GPS) service of the smartphone. The map generated indicates no disruption in pH for all sites measured, and all the data are assessed to fall inside the upper limit of local government regulations, consistent with authority reported measurements. This implementation demonstrates a new security concept: network environmental forensics utilizing the potential of novel smartgrid analysis with wireless sensors for the detection of potential disruption to water quality at any point in the city. This concept is applicable across all smartgrid strategies within the next generation of the Internet of Things and can be extended on national and global scales to address a range of target analytes, both chemical and biological.

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. interdisciplinary Photonics Laboratories (iPL), School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Md. Arafat Hossain & John Canning

  2. School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    John Canning, Sandra Ast & Peter J. Rutledge

  3. Wireless Networking Group (WiNG), School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Md. Arafat Hossain & Abbas Jamalipour

Authors
  1. Md. Arafat Hossain
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  2. John Canning
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  3. Sandra Ast
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  4. Peter J. Rutledge
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  5. Abbas Jamalipour
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to John Canning.

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This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

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Hossain, M.A., Canning, J., Ast, S. et al. Early warning smartphone diagnostics for water security and analysis using real-time pH mapping. Photonic Sens 5, 289–297 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13320-015-0256-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13320-015-0256-x

Keywords

  • Lab-in-a-phone
  • Internet of Things
  • optical sensing and sensor
  • smartphone sensor
  • photonic sensor
  • fluorescence
  • water security