Software for the system of European water monitoring

A lack of clean water is becoming a problem in Europe. There is a need to develop easily accessible, cheap and reliable microsystems for water pollution monitoring and early warning, which could be used in most water resources on our continent. The objective of the FP5 project SEWING is to create a system of continuous water pollution monitoring in real time. Small and cheap smart sensors are being developed, which, when inserted in many locations of water resources, will collect data about pollution with a number of selected non-organic ions. CHEMFETs are used as sensors. Data processing, coding, storing and transmitting circuits are on the same chip. The system needs quite elaborate software; some of the results of its preparation are presented in this paper. The models simulating the CHEMFETs are of a behavioural type, but based on physical phenomena in water solutions of cations and anions, and in the ionsensitive and ion-selective membranes deposited on the FET insulator. These models, after identification of their parameters through measurements, are used to prepare data fusion algorithms which give as a result the activity of particular ions in the solution. These results are stored in RAM integrated with the smart sensor construction. As the next part of software for the system, algorithms for data coding, transmission through the GSM network and final visualisation are completed. They are very flexible and can be used in different ways according to user demand.