A Rapid Adaptive Needs Assessment kit for water quality monitoring in Humanitarian Assistance & Disaster Response applications

After natural disasters, communities can be devastated from a lack of clean water. This can lead to death through dehydration, malnutrition, lack of sanitation, and disease propagation. Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response efforts by the United States military emphasize short-term options for access to safe drinking water. Typically, in the 72 hours immediately after a disaster, long-term water supply systems are not set-up, so soldiers rely on costly imported bottled water. The United States Army is developing Pre-positioned Expeditionary Assistance Kits, which include mobile water purification units to filter local water sources at disaster sites. This Capstone project, a continuation of a 2010-2011 Capstone project, sponsored by the Systems Engineering Research Center under a grant from the Department of Defense, focuses on evaluating the water quality of a particular source before deploying a water purification system. The Rapid Adaptive Needs Assessment kit performs this task immediately after a natural disaster. The kit measures water temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, turbidity, and pH and transmits the data to a command center where a decision algorithm ranks the water sources. The project´s operational success is measured by the system´s ability to determine the optimal local water source from multiple sources based on user preferences. This paper outlines the approach used to enhance the kit and describes the physical design, anchoring system, data communications system, decision algorithm, user interfaces, maintenance, and integration of parts into a portable, remote water monitoring system.