Objectives of the service
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Predictive smart health monitoring of public and community sanitation to allow for rapid response to disease outbreaks.
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Real-time environmental monitoring to assist in the detection of poor sanitation contamination events because of changes in weather or other environmental conditions.
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Geo-spatial planning to support improved location and connectivity of sanitation services and the location of toilet facilities.
Users and their needs
PYRNEXAT will be deployed in South Africa in the region of eThekwini, which contains the city of Durban. The project aims to address sanitation system delivery and management factoring the use of Faecal Sludge Treatment plants which are 20 times cheaper to deploy than conventional networked sewage systems and which remove all sanitation related pathogens from the waste streams.
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55% of wastewater treatment plants in South Africa do not meet effluent standards and some do not even measure effluent quality.
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In 2009, when 449 wastewater treatment plants were assessed, according to official government data 7% were classified as “excellently managed”, 38% "performed within acceptable standards" and 55% “did not perform within acceptable standards”.
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The African Development Bank estimates that $12 billion is required annually to cover Africa’s needs in improved water supply and sanitation.
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50,000 litres of untreated sewage is released every second in South Africa.
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South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of mortality for children under the age of five. About 10% of those deaths are from diarrhoea. The effects of E coli and other sewage-related pollutants in a population are very high particularly in areas with a high prevalence of HIV in the population. NOTE – the project will using an early-stage sensor development to look at proxy data representing E. coli and Salmonella Typhi as a means of verifying real-time pathogen detection in water and wastewater
Service/ system concept
The demonstration system will be the first phase in a long-term development to deliver next generation sanitation services. The initial solution aims to collect data from multiple sanitation related processes, addressing sanitation system use cases that deliver useful non-AI based applications to the industry in the immediate term. In providing sanitation management applications Woodco can capture usage data which can be applied to future artificial intelligence and machine learning services.
Woodco plans to develop a single platform-based ICT system to collect, treat and process sanitation related data using satellite technology, terrestrial sensor data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The platform will provide smart sanitation management data and deliver applications and services which can be used to manage the next generation sanitation infrastructure and provide AI based predictive analytics for sanitation and public health management. The system can consume toilet usage sensor data, Earth Observation data, GNSS/PNT data, Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant (FSTP) data. These data sets can be processes at the edge through the application of AI and Machine learning. By applying AI at the edge and at the core of the network, next generation smart sanitation applications can be developed.
Space Added Value
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Woodco will integrate Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 data initially with a focus on EO data from the Copernicus Programme, employing high-resolution radar imaging and multispectral imaging to develop models to allow Woodco amalgamate ground truth terrestrial data with satellite imaging to develop predictive health data which factors environmental conditions over a wide area. This will include topography, land use, population density and weather.
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Where physical faecal Sludge sampling occurs to collect empirical data on pathogen concentration in the trial region, the location data will be GNSS waymarked to link the sample and the location to allow us to overlay the location with the laboratory test outcome and any associated pathogen.
Current Status
The project was launched at International Toilet Day (November 19th, 2020) in association with the Toilet Board Coalition. The project has gone through operational changes:
The baseline design review took place on March 19th, 2021, and was successfully completed.
The critical design review took place on October 4th, 2021, and was successfully completed
The first factory acceptance test took place on October 10th and was successfully completed
The baseline design review of the updated system took place on 26th of August 2024
