Product Design
How we made a mobile app to tackle the freshwater crisis at Aquahacking — ErieGo Process Case Study
Gamifying data collection to empower citizen scientists
Over the course of 6 months, we teamed up, created, and presented our solution for the All Eyes on Erie challenge held at the University of Waterloo for AquaHacking.
The Challenge
The Aquahacking Challenge is a multi-stage hackathon that focuses on developing functional, marketable solutions to address the critical freshwater issues in Canada. Every year the challenge chooses a different watershed to innovate on.
The 2017 edition focused on Lake Erie.
The Team
Understanding the problem space
Lake Erie is the 4th largest lake of the five Great Lakes in North America by surface area. It is located south of Ontario, Canada and touches four US states — New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. It is the primary source of drinking water for about 11M+ people. Beautiful towns along the shoreline, beaches, and craft beer bring in major tourist attention every year. According to Port Clinton News Herald, tourism generated $2.1B in the Lake Erie region in 2018.
Defining the major issues
In order to better define the problem, we conducted research on the major issues surrounding Lake Erie. The top 3 were,
- Industrial waste disposal: In the 60s, heavy industry waste disposal polluted the water with reports of beaches and fishes being contaminated.
- Invasive species: Invasive fish species(Asian carp, and Snakehead fish) threaten to disturb the local ecosystem.
- Runoff pollution from urban and agricultural lands: The fertilizers applied to the agricultural lands run off into the nearby waters creating a buildup of chemicals, namely phosphorus. This results in toxic blue-green algae that kill the fish and fouls the water.
Stakeholder needs
After understanding the problem space and the broader issues, we started looking at the stakeholders involved and their specific pain points using IBM Design Thinking.
- Lake Erie: The most important stakeholder. The lake has an innate need to be clean, healthy, and be able to support life. Pain points: Local ecosystems being negatively affected by pollution.
- Community: The towns and families living near the lake enjoy activities — fishing, biking, public parks, etc. Pain points: Unsafe water, younger generations starting to move away.
- Tourism: The beautiful beaches along the shorelines attract tourists. The EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) declaring the Western Lake Erie “impaired” has drastically slowed down the tourism industry and local businesses that depended on it. Pain points: Not enough local businesses around, unhealthy looking water, and closed beaches.
- Academia: Researchers have set up stations in Western Lake Erie to collect various data points monitoring the water quality. Pain points: Limited tools to collect, transmit, and store quality data.
- Policy Makers: The local government creates policies and sets goals to curb the damage done. Pain points: Outdated data.
Consolidating Research
Looking closely at the pain points of the identified stakeholders, we noticed a severe lack of available data to accurately assess the issues.
The Big Question
After considering the major issues, stakeholder needs, and technical constraints, we narrowed down our problem to one question.
How can we gamify collecting quality data for citizens living near Lake Erie using their smartphones so the insights can be used by policy makers to create future goals?
Technical Constraints
After knowing the stakeholders involved, we decided to limit constraint ourselves to create a solution that is,
1. Low cost
2. Smartphone-based
3. Easy learning curve
Proposed Solution
Build a Pokemon Go-like mobile app with which users will be able to
- Take photographs of plants and animal species found in the area. This will allow them to learn more if it is one of the recognized species.
- Record the quality of water at a certain location with a photo and a description.
- Report any anomalies in the area.
The recorded information will be sent along with the user’s tagged location data. The users will be awarded reward points for their effort that can be redeemed at nearby shops.
We decided to put our thoughts on paper and see what the user journey would look like.
Technology
For the prototype, we decided to use IBM Watson Visual Recognition for image recognition and IBM Watson Natural Language to gain insights from NLP descriptions.
The Impact
1. Families will have a fun activity to do together.
2. Academia will have access to reliable crowd-sourced data.
3. Local businesses can benefit from an increase in tourism. Direct incentives as PokeStops means more tourists will check them out.
4. A live real-time data feed can be used to build more useful applications on top by other startups.
Presentation
We prepared a 5-minute pitch to present in front of 100 guests and 5 judges at CIGI in Waterloo.
Unfortunately, we did not have a polished enough product to move on to the next stage. Congratulations to Blue Lion Labs, EMAGIN, Maple Precision, PolyGone, and ImPONDerable for working on absolutely groundbreaking innovations and going on all the way to the finals.
Even though our journey ended shortly we learned a lot on the way. I personally have a lot of newfound respect for all the freshwater sources in Canada and the need to protect them for generations to come.
It was scary but we got to learn a lot. Thank you Aquahacking for having us.
Find me on Twitter and let’s have a chat :)
