Long-term high precision and responsive water consumption monitoring

The exploitable result is a smarter edge device able to faster detect anomalies (within a few hours compared to minimum 24 hours for the other solutions in the market) with an extended battery lifetime (more than 10 years) while preserving the data privacy. Detection time and battery lifetime are key features for the customers as the sooner a water leak is detected, the sooner they can fix it and the less money they lose. Moreover they want a “plug-and-forget” hardware which battery lifetime is critical for.

• Data compression Reduces the message lengths which leaves room for longer time between two sendings and therefore allows an extension of the battery life. The compression is based on Fibonacci encoding.
• Anomaly detection on the edge Improves the detection time compared to a purely cloud-based detection. The algorithm takes advantage of the compression from the Fibonacci encoding and also uses the run-length encoding (RLE) algorithm. Intelligently combining the compression lengths allows to detect anomalies from the data sequences.
• Privacy-preserving anomaly-aware sending scheme Adjusts the time between two sendings depending on the presence of an anomaly to allow faster alarming in case of an anomaly and energy saving in case of no anomaly. This is performed in a randomized way in order not to be able to make conclusions on the water usage from simply looking at the message sendings distribution over time.

No integration constraints. The exploitable result is a smarter edge device. The improvements from the project solely reside in the edge device firmware. The only requirement to use the edge device remains unchanged and is a water meter which is pulse-ready.

This new technology can be applied to all our direct customers or end-users as they benefit from an improved service. Our end users are large real-estate owners and facility managers that supervise good use of water in their buildings.

This will be used in the case of customers using Shayp's hardware to monitor their water consumption. Shayp also provides it services through API integration with hardware (edge devices) from other brands. In this case, the additional benefits from this result do not apply. But for Shayp, 90% of our customers use our edge devices.