Water Source Australia has created a unique and licensable software solution to remotely monitor its Brolga water units. The ELEIoT system's potential goes much further.
It used to only be in sci-fi movies that the robots were ‘coming to get us’. But lately, with the real world rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the unfortunately even sharper rise in ‘AI will kill us all!’ narratives, it can be easy to forget just how useful internet-based technology can be.
Water Source Australia spotted the Internet-of-Things potential a long time ago and is finally able to reveal the result, ELEIoT – the secret sauce that makes the Brolga water filtration system such a groundbreaking invention.
While the Brolga is an amazing piece of kit on its own, able to turn substandard water into potable drinking water, the fact is that such a filtration system is not new. In fact, almost every part of the Brolga is off-the-shelf technology, just put together in a very clever way.
Except for one thing. There was a major problem with previous filtration systems that nobody had ever been able to solve: what to do when something goes wrong?
Because while it’s wonderful to place a filtration system into a remote town, an indigenous community or even a far-flung location of need in another country, the system becomes a vastly oversized paperweight if it stops working and nobody realises, and then nobody knows how to fix it.
The logistics of having a plumber or technician physically travel often hundreds of kilometres to visit an ailing filtration system remains incompatible with most economic management models, and so filtration systems end up gathering dust instead of life-giving water.
This is where Water Source’s ingenuity comes in via the company’s proprietary component, ELEIoT, a true Internet-of-things management system that is unique and revolutionary. A multi-layered, enterprise-grade IoT platform, ELEIoT is embedded within every part of the Brolga system.
ELEIoT’s network of distributed and interconnected sensors collect and exchange data, meaning every Brolga system out in the world can be monitored in real time, to the nano-second. Solutions to potential blockages or filtering issues can be remotely activated. Not-so-future iterations will see active Brolgas across the globe machine-learn and instruct one another on how to automatically solve common issues, without human intervention.
Every component of the Brolga is connected to ELEIoT; an achievement that has seen the system quickly gain the attention of other non-water industries that suffer similar issues with real-time monitoring of systems, from beer production to medical manufacturing applications. There are many industries where costly redundancies can occur from a technician needing to painstakingly work backwards along pipes or wires to find the glitch in the process. ELEIoT issues an alert whenever any single component shows unreasonable stress.
Water Source Australia founder, philanthropist Graeme Wise, said ELEIoT was one of two points of difference that the Brolga had on previous systems.
‘Where we have got a unique place is the size of the Brolga, and the smarts,’ he explained. ‘It’s not a huge unit so you don’t have to have multi millions of dollars to put it together. And then there’s ELEIoT – which means we can talk to it, we can control it, we can listen to what it’s saying to us and we can turn it off. We can make it back flush. We can do this wherever it is in the world, with the exception of places that don’t have internet connection but even then, Elon Musk’s Starlink project can potentially play a role.’
The system was designed by Steve Old, one of those natural coders who saw a computer as a kid and just somehow knew how to talk to it. That talent translated into an important original thought during the initial development of ELEIoT as Steve considered the reality that most software becomes redundant because it is specifically written to task, whereas the Brolga system was intended to live in remote settings while also needing to be highly adaptable.
Steve’s solution was to code the platform as a sort of ‘base’ code, that can then be built onto with new code for alternate functions and limitless variations. With the addition of some brilliant support and technical savvy from the team at Amazon Web Services (AWS), ELEIoT is now well placed to lead an innovative approach to the application of IoT and AI.
This is why, in parallel with powering the Brolga, ELEIoT is now being offered as a licensed product to help companies wishing to leapfrog the technical development required for IoT project deployment. ELEIoT is pre-prepared to be crafted into whatever they need, and interest is already strong.
