The project, called Luft och Vatten (Air and Water)-Internet of Things in full, started back in 2017. Currently consisting of 15 partners, the project was first initiated by IoT Sweden. IoT Sweden is an innovation program funded by Vinnova, Energimyndigheten and Formas. LoV-IoT is one of thirteen IoT projects in Sweden within the strategic innovation program IoT Sweden. The mission is to be part of the national goal of ‘being best at using digitalization in society’. One of the key aspects is therefore to bring solutions from the IoT industry into applications for municipalities and society. The first implementations are in the field of monitoring air quality and wastewater.

Air quality
Increased urbanization changes our cities and we should think about the air quality around us in light of this. One of the trial cases in the LoV-IoT project is measuring the air quality in Gothenburg. Several variables of air quality, such as dust particles and carbon dioxide, are measured to represent a clear picture of the air pollution in the city. This data can function as a driver for regulatory institutes to take action but also for the citizens to avoid areas with polluted air.

Water quality
The quality of water and smart solutions to maintain a high level of water quality are becoming increasingly important. One of the trial cases consisted of water level monitoring in sewage systems in Gothenburg, Sweden.  Already in the first period, the results were very clear, as critical threshold values were consistently exceeded during heavy rainfalls, resulting in the mixing of storm water and wastewater in the sewage systems of the city. This data allows us to rethink our sewage systems, which today is a passive system of pipes. In the future we can build upon a wide set of data, collected from weather stations, ground measurements, forecasts and more, to create a system that allows us to actively control the water, reroute water in the case of incoming rainfalls and store water until treatments plans have the capacity to deal with it.

Project success
While the project continues in Sweden, it has also received international recognition. Several stakeholders, including Talkpool, are taking the lessons learned in the project into a recently started Horizon 2020 project by the name of SCOREwater. In this project, funded by the EU innovation program Horizon 2020, experiences from Gothenburg, Amersfoort (The Netherlands) and Barcelona (Spain), will be utilized to develop new innovative ways for handling storm-, waste- and rainfall water. Secondly, the LoV-IoT project itself has expanded internationally, to Chile, with Centro Mario Molino as the most recently joined partner in the project consortium. Currently, the exporting of the Swedish solutions and its applicability in Chile is further explored.

Talkpool has been a project member since the start and Fredrik Hallgren, project manager at IVL, described the company’s role as follows:

“Talkpool is one of the key actors in LoV-IoT, a smart city project in Sweden. LoV-IoT has the vision of generating better public health by helping cities’ air and water monitoring programs and Talkpool provides knowledge and solutions for IoT in the project. They provide both connectivity through building a LoRaWAN network but also sensors for water monitoring and knowledge regarding IoT platforms for handling data, making it a valuable partner on the road to developing smart cities.”

Fredrik Hallgren, project manager at IVL

With its experience in Internet of Things solutions and smart city projects, Talkpool aims to contribute to citizen-friendly, sustainable, smart cities of the future. More information can be found on the project website: http://www.loviot.se/. Also stay tuned on Talkpool’s channels as this article is part of a series on the LoV-IoT project, we will highlight various aspects of this project in future articles.