Cloud-enabled internet of things for environmental data collection

Accurately and inexpensively collecting relevant flooding and water quality monitoring data is essential for sustainable environmental management and disaster resilience. To address this challenge, this paper aims at investigating the feasibility of a cloud-enabled internet of things (IoT) for ubiquitous environmental data collection. We present the design of a cloud-enabled IoT, which is implemented using Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a variety of 30-party sensor probes for data collection. A camera sensor is also utilised to capture images of the surrounding environment to help with decision making. The collected water parameters and images are transmitted to a cloud platform hosted at ThingSpeak . Our experimentation demonstrates an effective prototype with acceptable inaccuracies in the data, considering the inherent discrepancies incurred by sensor hardware devices and the calibration process. The proposed data collection framework may serve as a model for designing a remote environmental monitoring system to enable research across various disciplines.