A man drives a pickup truck down a dirt road in oppressive heat. He’s miles from anywhere, hundreds of miles from Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia. His job is to gather data about the water in a well, to ensure that the Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR) can make good decisions about water use—on which the state’s multi-million-dollar industries depend.
A year ago, this DEWNR field officer would have taken down data on paper, sometimes requiring several trips to and from the truck. But now he has the Water2Mobile app for a tablet or smartphone, developed by students at CMU Australia. The app was designed especially for field officers to use in the bush, allowing them to carry detailed information about the wells without dragging along binders of paperwork. It’s vital to get measurements right, because no one may visit again for months, so the app prompts users to double-check data that fall outside historical norms. And it works even without mobile phone coverage, which is important in remote areas like this.
Water2Mobile was the capstone project for a team of MS students in CMU Australia’s information technology program: Abhishek Easwar, Jimmy Galindo Gamboa, Cong Huu Hoang, Razaullah Khan, Romeo Nyalo Luka, Umair Bin Saeed, and Srinivasan Vembuli.
The app was ceremonially handed off to the state of South Australia last spring and has received high praise from DEWNR Chief Executive Allan Holmes for helping his field officers to “get it right.”
—Lorelei Laird (DC’01)
Related Links:
Australian Ingenuity
