Development of a Low-Cost Solar Powered & Real-Time Water Quality Monitoring System for Malaysia Seawater Aquaculture: Application & Challenges

Harmful algal bloom (HAB) has been a long-term threat to the ecosystem as it pollutes water and reduces the safe water usage worldwide. Therefore, scientists and researchers dedicated tremendous time and efforts to prevent the growth of algal by monitoring and profiling the water quality index. However, provided that the expensive cost of the commercialised sensor, including the dynamic and causality of algae, complicated the process, this article discusses on the progress of a low-priced realtime monitoring system for water quality through the solar panel to perform preliminary studies on the water quality data. Profiling environmental readings is a crucial step in gaining an insight into the algal bloom growth. Furthermore, the real-time data collection from the system was continuously performed at the sea, leading to consistent data transfer to the server through a 3G network despite the remote monitoring. Notably, the two benefits of this system included the solution to the laborious process, which was based on manual sample collections. The second benefit was the database, which provided information on safe WQI for the fish farm and insight about algae growth, which could be used in the predictive modelling phase.