The World Bank estimates water wastage costs US$14 billion (€11 billion) a year worldwide and, in developing countries, the water lost to leaks and theft could potentially serve 200 million more people.
Arad has already installed wireless water meter systems in some of Israel's largest cities, such as Petach-Tikva near Tel-Aviv. Installing the 75,000 wireless water meters helped reduce water loss from 12% to 2% because leaks are detected almost instantaneously whereas before they were only revealed when a meter reader visited every 60 days to check the meter. Now a vehicle drives around and collects the water usage information, or the data is sent via a wide area wireless network back to the monitoring station. In addition to conserving water, this has reduced costs for both the utility and consumer.
Arad's water meters have 3G wireless technology built in, a microcontroller, and 20-year lifetime batteries. Every 11 to 30 seconds the system transmits data, to be received by the travelling data collection vehicle or fixed wide area wireless network.
Taking data collection one step further, Arad's drones will wirelessly read the water-meter system to detect leakage or, in irrigation systems, detect drought. The drone is particularly good at collecting data from a large geographic area, and avoids having to send people to read meters or installing a high power wireless network in what may be a sparsely populated area.
Arad has already used this wireless technology in the United States, Brazil, China, India, and Russia with plans to wirelessly monitor other municipal infrastructure services such as traffic lights and security-camera networks.
Saving water is a great service, as is delivering water to those unable to have this life saving necessity close to hand, and using the electric powered drones for monitoring over large areas is likely to save time, resources, money and eliminate greenhouse gases (a lot less driving). However, adding yet more wireless broadcasting to an already increasingly radiation filled living space, may not be the best plan. Rather than constantly transmitting, maybe their wireless system could be in receive-only mode, until the drone contacts it, and then send the data, minimizing the wireless broadcasting.
Visit: www.aradtec.com
Via FastCompany
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Make no mistake, the evidence from independently-funded in-vitro studies is quite clear: wireless technology undermines the proper biological functioning of every living thing that it touches. It’s effect on human health is serious, but it is likely only the tip of the ecological iceberg; wireless radiation, for instance, has been shown to interfere with bees ability to navigate, and is in all likelihood an important factor in colony-collapse disorder.
Here is what the wireless industry’s own former chief scientist, now a whistleblower, has to say about the health effects of wireless technology:
“It is not an illusion, but a reality that threatens the essence of our being, the futures of our children, and the fragile ecological balance of a planet already under siege. It is potentially more serious than global warming, and already claiming lives…
Peer-reviewed studies from around the world show cell phones and other wireless technologies, ranging from WiFi in schools to transmission towers in neighborhoods, cause adverse biological effects and disease. ICRW [information-carrying radio waves] and other types of electromagnetic radiation can act both as direct causes of disease and as indirect antagonists or synergens, facts already known in the scientific community even as more precise scientific information is gathered.
Cause and effect (a pathological mechanism of harm) are now linked. Cumulative science has laid the ground-work to prove medical causation under stringent Daubert standards. Indeed, scientists and clinicians who study the health effects of wireless technology have shifted the debate from whether cell phones cause health problems (they do) to the urgent need for remedies than can control emerging medical problems affecting millions daily.
A profound urgency exists because the most vulnerable are precisely the demographic groups most likely to need assistance: the young, the sick, the elderly and the poor. Epidemiological studies show significant increased risk of benign and malignant brain tumors, acoustic neuroma, and melanoma of the eye and salivary gland tumors after ten years of cell phone use. Some studies suggest that even short-term use statistically increases cancer risk. Neurological disease and autism have also been linked to wireless radiation exposure.
Patients with electro-hypersensitivity, for example, cannot work in environments with any type of electromagnetic radiation exposure–areas absent exposure are almost nonexistent. These people have become permanent unemployable. Thus, the effects of cell phone radiation have drifted into areas of fundamental public policy… some governments around the world–but not ours–have begun to take steps to protect vulnerable populations.”
-Dr. George Carlo, PhD
Carlo is the former lead scientist of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s research project on the health effects of wireless technology.