An important direction in making measurement instruments is making them simpler, cheaper and accessible to many people. An interesting development in this direction has been made at SYKE (the Finland Environmental Administration): the Secchi3000 Turbidity analyser, in which a standard mobile phone camera serves as the measurement instrument.

Secchi3000 was developed to be a low cost and simple operation tool for water quality measurements. The objective was to offer it also for non-experts and citizens interested in water quality issues. Performing measurement with Secchi 3000 is simple: The user fills the Secchi3000 container with water from a lake, river or sea, places the measurement structure in the container and takes a photograph with a mobile phone through a hole in the lid of the device (Figure on the right). The photograph is taken with an application called EnviObserver (developed by VTT, Finland). The application sends the photograph to a server together with metadata such as the location of the measurement. At the server the photograph is analysed with an algorithm, which finds the target areas from the picture and computes water quality parameters based on the brightness values of the target areas. Finally, the results are sent back to the user’s mobile phone and stored in data bases.

For more information please download the poster about the Secchi3000 water turbidity analyser.

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