A Longitudinal Study of Vibration-Based Water Flow Sensing

Abstract

We present a long-term and cross-sectional study of a vibration-based water flow rate monitoring system in practical environments and scenarios. In our earlier research, we proved that a water flow monitoring system with vibration sensors is feasible by deploying and evaluating it in a small-scale laboratory setting. To validate the proposed system, the system was deployed in existing environments-two houses and a public restroom-and in two different laboratory test settings. With the collected data, we first demonstrate various aspects of the system's performance, including sensing stability, sensor node lifetime, the stability of autonomous sensor calibration, time to adaptation, and deployment complexity. We then discuss the practical challenges and lessons from the full-scale deployments. The evaluation results show that our water monitoring solution is a practical, quick-to-deploy system with a less than 5% average flow estimation error.