City Sewage Health Monitoring System Design

What it does

Smart sewage system analyzes user behavior to boost efficiency. Collects community samples for tailored solutions, featuring service design, monitoring/sampling devices, and analytics software while enhancing testing/service performance.

Your inspiration

Since COVID-19 emerged in 2019, sewage-based health monitoring has gained research attention. However, most studies focus on biosciences, neglecting user experience (UX) from a design perspective. This gap may hinder technology adoption, reducing service usability. We propose a system to collect and analyze urban sewage data (e.g., chemical, epidemiological, and public health metrics) for tailored community solutions. Such a system holds significant social value, aligning with China’s "Healthy China" initiative.

How it works

Urban sewage health monitoring service system: data terminals (user, operation & maintenance, management) + community detection/sampling equipment. Community detection has coordinated hardware: ① Sewage collection: Peristaltic pumps/solenoid valves control fluid; sampling via liquid level sensor feedback. ② Detection: pH/COD sensors (electrochemical/optical) convert signals via ADC, processed by ARM. ③ Data analysis: InfluxDB servers, Spark Streaming nodes, edge units with TensorFlow. ④ Communication: 5G modules modulate radio signals via baseband chips for remote transmission. ⑤ Disinfection: UV-C/ozone for disinfection; RFID readers communicate with sampling tags. ⑥ Display: TFT-LCD for interaction; monitoring with CMOS cameras/video chips. ⑦ Host: STM32 coordinates I2C/SPI communication.

Design process

Our team’s work: ① Identified stakeholders, formulated research plans, and mapped user behavior processes. The first activity involved 30 sewage health monitoring professionals in participatory design; the second included 30 residents from the same community. This helped establish a document on user behaviors and meanings in sewage health monitoring. ② Built an urban sewage monitoring service system (data terminals, community detection/sampling equipment) with communities as key points, enabling regionalized precise positioning. ③ Practiced designing the product-service system: initial sketches analyzed shape pros/cons and structural fit, followed by model/structure iterations. The final product shape (as shown) was determined via repeated prototype comparisons. ④ Evaluated the system using Nielsen’s usability theory: 8 mobile-literate residents tested iterated prototypes, revealing over 80% of usability issues with an occurrence rate of ~88%, meeting expectations.

How it is different

The system: ① Starting with user behavior, it uses participatory design to study behaviors, applies semiotic organizational features as a framework, and builds a user demand model combining participatory design and semiotic ladders. ② Focusing on communities, it examines residents' and monitors' behaviors/experiences in public health activities, and improves community health through practical verification with usability tests. ③ Composed of data terminals, community detection/sampling equipment, it deploys detection devices per community (based on urban living characteristics). Inter-device linkage enables parallel community detection to boost efficiency. Sampling equipment, placed in sewers by staff, automates timed collection, enhancing staff experience.

Future plans

Our team's research, published in 2024 in the Chinese core journal *Packaging Engineering*, verified the service system's overall process through multiple prototype tests and optimizations. We believe sewage holds vast information usable for population health, lifestyle, food safety analysis, illegal drug supervision, infectious disease early warning and control, etc. Future sewage health monitoring product-service systems will grow more intelligent and automated, using advanced sensing technologies and data analysis algorithms to accurately monitor harmful substances and bacteria in sewage, providing timely warnings and suggestions.

Awards

One Chinese core journal article