University students lead creek clean up

LA Trobe university students are leading a project to help re-naturalise contaminated parts of Bendigo Creek.

Masters students of the Australian-first Internet of Things course have developed a prototype to collect data like water flow, clarity and pH levels in the creek in partnership with the municipality’s Reimagining Bendigo Creek plan.

Senior water strategy officer at the City of Greater Bendigo Liam Sibly said the data collected will help guide the recovery process.

“We’re really trying to understand ‘what is the health of the creek?’ and this is things like how much dirt is coming down it, how much salt is coming down it as well as other contaminants and by understanding this we’ll know where to intervene within the catchment,” he said.

“At the moment we only have very limited data of where the problems are so the more intelligence we have across the catchment, we can better use rate payer dollars to fix up the creek.”

Water monitoring sensors sit in the creek to measure data which is then shared to a cloud platform, with the whole design informed by Indian research papers and tested in a university environment.

Two prototypes will be trialled at strategic points along the creek over the coming weeks and IoT student Ayush Mainali said its ongoing use could reveal patterns in the data which could then be used help act on natural disasters like flooding.

“If you collect the data for around one year, two years, then we can see the pattern, we can visualise the pattern,” he said.

“Later on, it might be used as an alerting system as well so if something is happening, that has already happened, in the future we can do some analysis and we can prevent some natural calamities.”

Head of La Trobe University’s Technology and Innovation Lab Simon Egerton said IoT technology could also be used throughout the community.

“We’d like to know what members of the public would like to see happen with this technology, either to improve the creek, or for other community projects that require innovative solutions.”

Community contributions can be emailed to [email protected].