Holly Chiang: 2016 IoT Workshop

2:30pm

University-wide efforts at Stanford to reduce water usage have motivated the development of a device capable of measuring the impact of such water saving policies. Commercially available water sensors tend to either collect data on aggregate water usage or make the assumption that the individual who uses water is also the one who is interested in collecting the data. To address these limitations we developed Tethys, an energy-harvesting wireless water flow sensor to monitor water use at a per-fixture level, with the intention of identifying patterns in community and individual water use. Tethys required the design and implementation of a human safe, high temperature tolerant enclosure whose energy harvesting can perpetually power the device, along with secure and reliable end-to-end data transmission through crowd-sourced mobile phone gateways. This talk will outline some of the key challenges we faced in developing Tethys and in transitioning from prototyping to deployment.

Holly Chiang is a second year electrical engineering PhD student working with Professor Philip Levis at Stanford University. The Internet of Things will change the way we interact with the world and the aim of her research is to work on hardware and software approaches that will allow the development of IoT devices to be more accessible.