IoT Monitoring Mexico City Water Quality and Supply

At an elevation of nearly 7,400 feet from sea level, Mexico City is one of the largest and oldest cities in the Americas. Founded in 1521, it was constructed on top of the ancient Aztec City of Tenochtitlan and serves as an epicenter of art, culture and the Internet of Things (IoT).

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Founder & CEO of NDS Cognitive Labs Gustavo Pares, where he highlighted how the IoT is elevating the quality of drinking water in Mexico City.

As Pares explained, “Mexico City is a very high city, which requires all water to be pumped up into the mountains” in order to support the municipalities population of about 25 million. For people living in the area, water is a big issue.

The first challenge was installing several thousand drinking points. Once the physical components are in place, there are “intangibles” to address, which brings us to the second major hurdle of the project, “Now that we have all this data, how do we make sure everyone can access it?”

As part of the initiative’s SLA, all the components of the supply chain require predictive maintenance, in addition to collecting, measuring and analyzing water quality data. The struggle here, Pares explained is the lack of data standardization. For example, from one city in a county to another city or county, water quality data is published different, it’s critical to “take all this unstructured data, collect and unify information to be able to reassess a standard of information.

The keystone for NDS was to determine next steps to bring together the IoT piece and cloud solution in order to complete analysis of this wealth of data. From there, it’s a matter of providing data in a digestible way, on an understandable interface. Early dashboard iterations delivered data in mass but proved confusing, so NDS determined the answer, limit access by job purview.

The nationwide project is starting in nine states, with the principal goals of guaranteeing the availability and quality of water. The initiative “requires a layer of lab results, information on sewers, socio-economic demographics” and the ability to monitor and measure a long list of biochemical attributes.

While COVID curtailed initial rollout, water supply and quality is a critical matter, and NDS is forging ahead with facilitating refreshment – maybe even put an end to Montezuma’s revenge.

How smart is your city?