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Since 2007, Deep Springs International (DSI, a non-profit organization based in Pennsylvania, USA) has been providing water treatment kits to Haitians. Each kit contains a five-gallon plastic bucket with lid and faucet, chlorine solution and instructions for use of the kit.
As part of this project, DSI sent technicians to the families who used the kit to check whether these users were using the kit correctly and provide additional chlorine solution if needed. In order to better manage its technicians and the data generated, this organization has begun to use RFID technology, attaching NFC passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags to plastic buckets, and using NFC-enabled mobile phones to collect data and forward it to the backend. system.
The mobile phone was provided by the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in California, and the software was developed by David Holstius, a student and PhD candidate at the University of California.
DSI signed a contract with a Haitian company to produce this plastic bucket, and then distribute it to households in Haiti for free. Users can add water to the plastic bucket and add some chlorine solution to kill the pathogens that may exist in the water. Michael Ritter, project manager of the Haitian company, said that DSI’s charge is $1.25 per bottle of chlorine solution. These water treatment technicians often visit household users who use the kit to determine whether the water is properly chlorinated and sell the chlorine solution to households with few reserves.
In 2009, when Joseph “Jofish” Kaye, a senior research scientist and ethnologist at the NRC, discussed with a fellow of the Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organization a project to use Nokia technology to improve tracking of clean water usage, he learned The project implemented by DSI in Haiti. DSI claims that its chlorine solution-based water treatment system is called Gadyen Dlo (RFID radio frequency bulletin: Haitian Creole, meaning “guard of water”). This system kills the pathogens that make people sick and makes users suffer from diarrhea. The odds are reduced by 50%. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the recent cholera outbreak brought the Gadyen Dlo system to the attention of multiple agencies, including the Haitian government.
Kaye learned that DSI’s water treatment technicians used to manually record the test results and the sales of the chlorine solution on three-hole binder paper, and submitted reports to the staff of the DSI organization, and manually input them into the back-end system. This process is very slow for the records of the technicians and the computer input of the office staff, and it does not prove that the technicians have indeed visited every household that uses the kit.
After Kaye proposed the NFC-enabled solution to Nokia’s Global University Fund, he received $10,000 in funding to complete the project. Then he met with Holstius to develop a back-end software that allows DSI to view and store the visit information of water treatment technicians. This application software uses the FrontlineSMS platform to manage the information and data sent by the technicians when they complete the water quality test. Holstius also wrote a mobile phone software application that can prompt technicians to answer questions in the water quality test. The initial prompt was written in French, but now it is also available in English and Creole.
In October 2010, this system was officially launched, and about 50 Nokia 6212 NFC-enabled mobile phones were used by technicians. Kaye also provided 22,000 UPM RFID UHF Gen 2 RFID tags, of which UPM RFID donated 2,000 tags and sold the remaining tags to Nokia at cost. Holstius spent about a week in Haiti installing software on DSI’s back-end systems and mobile phones to help train water treatment technicians to use this system on Nokia mobile phones, and sticky glue on the outside of each plastic bucket Tag of.
Each water treatment technician manages about 250 households and visits almost every month. When arriving at a user’s home, the technician first detects the water quality, and then taps the NFC tag of the bucket with the mobile phone to obtain the unique ID number of the tag. The technician receives the prompt on the mobile phone and asks: “How is the result of the water quality test?” and “How much chlorine solution is left?” and “How much chlorine solution have you sold?” When the technician responds to these prompts, these messages It is sent as an SMS message to the FrontlineSMS software running on the DSI back-end server. If there is no cellular connection, the phone will store the data until it enters the range of the cellular.
The system currently includes 35,000 RFID-enabled drinking water buckets. Kaye said that he has received funding from Nokia to add 100 mobile phones to the project.
Ritter said that so far, the system has worked well. The data returned from the technicians’ mobile phones indicated which households they visited, the results of the water quality tests, and the amount of chlorine solution used. Unlike manual paper recording methods, RFID solutions can provide information reliably and in real time.
Kaye said that he hopes to see this solution expand to other parts of the world, which can be used to monitor water quality testing or other health or safety related fields.
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