Sahithi Pingali, a Std. XII student of Inventure Academy, Begaluru created an app and a lake monitoring kit to collect crowdsourced data. She achieved this by conducting surveys, consulting experts and talking to people who live and work around lakes. She tested the water from nine lakes in Bengaluru.
For her work, she was recognised at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) the world’s largest pre-college science competition. A minor planet in the Milky Way has been named after her.
What: Pingali’s paper was titled. An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies .
How the app works:
Citizens can collect data through a low-cost, easy-to-use mobile-based water testing kit.
The app works with electronic sensors and chemical test strips. You
The sensors sync with the app by Bluetooth.
Chemical test strips work with an automatic phone-camera. It is based on colour recognition and mapping software that is built into the app.
Put the test strip inside a dark box, point your phone camera and flash at it, and click.
The app maps the captured strip colour to the contaminant concentration value.
High achiever: Of the 21 awards the Indian contingent took home, Pingali’s impressive findings and presentation made her one among the top three per cent of the finalists at ISEF overall, and placed her second in the Earth and Environment Sciences category. She also won three special awards.
Earlier this year, she won a Gold Medal at the International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project) Olympiad (ISWEEEP ) at Houston, for her work on Varthur Lake.
