Join the workshop 'Smart sensors for resilience' during TU Delft | Global Initiative "Impact Day" on the 26th November 2019 and win a study trip to Ghana

THE CHALLENGES

Challenge 1: TAHMO – Environmental Quality in African Cities
We know very little about the environmental quality of African cities but anyone who has been stuck in traffic in, say, Nairobi or Lagos, may worry that the air is not completely clean. Traffic also causes noise. Water is often severely polluted. How would you go about measuring environmental quality in African cities? Can you build a business case around it to make it pay for itself?

Challenge 2: TWIGA & Plantenna
Detecting crop water status/water stress at the plant level: the challenge is to design sensors that measure plant water status at the individual plant level. An important application for these measurements will be to combine them with drone (and satellite) imagery to detect crop water status and diagnose water stress as input for a “plant-health-early-warning system”.

Challenge 3: River Flow Observations
Global river observation site coverage, especially in the Global South, is difficult to maintain or extend, and is in fact declining. This is in part due to the fact that rivers may be difficult to access, observation equipment is sensitive to failure, and rivers are highly dynamic, making the relationship between what is actually measured, and the observed river profiles with river flows difficult. River flow observations are essential to manage scarce water resources, warn for floods and understand long-term changes in river and flow dynamics, including those induced by climate change. How do we enable water authorities to observe their rivers, the geometry and real-time flow? What novel observation sensors can work under low human and financial resource availability, and can be deployed sustainably so that they will be taken up broadly?