Testing, inspection, and certification agency SOCOTEC UK and Eire has secured a contract with Yorkshire Water—in partnership with UnifAI Expertise—to deploy AI-powered, steady water high quality monitoring throughout 20 inland bathing websites. The initiative, funded by way of Ofwat’s Water Breakthrough Problem, is certainly one of 16 innovation tasks sharing over £42 million.1
Underneath the scheme, SOCOTEC will set up and keep superior sensor arrays measuring temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, ammonia, and turbidity. These sensors will feed real-time knowledge into UnifAI’s AI engine, which has been educated utilizing hundreds of thousands of historic knowledge factors to deduce the seemingly presence of dangerous micro organism like E. coli, with out the necessity for direct microbial sampling. Preliminary fashions predict bacterial threat by correlating patterns in environmental readings with lab-tested bacterial ranges.
One seemingly novel side of the undertaking is its site-agnostic AI strategy: as a substitute of every location requiring bespoke fashions, UnifAI goals to develop generalized AI fashions that may work “out-of-the-box” throughout various water our bodies, and so don’t must be educated on localised knowledge. That scalability may considerably scale back rollout prices and time, widening the applicability of this sort of real-time monitoring system.2
SOCOTEC’s position contains set up, day by day knowledge validation, weekly interim reporting, and managing over 7,000 river spot samples for ongoing calibration. This mixed effort guarantees to exchange conventional lab testing with close to real-time alerts, empowering public customers to make knowledgeable selections whereas supporting regulators and utilities with well timed knowledge.
OFWAT has awarded £1.9 million to the undertaking, titled “Web site-Agnostic AI Fashions for Water High quality and Security” which brings collectively contributions from Yorkshire Water, The Rivers Belief, Surfers Towards Sewage, British Requirements Institute, UnifAI Expertise, and United Utilities.3
Notes
[1] PRESS RELEASE: SOCOTEC UK and Eire Secures Progressive AI-Pushed Water High quality Monitoring Contract with Yorkshire Water, printed on 4 August 2025.
[2] https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/satellites-robots-drones-and-ai-among-winners-of-ofwats-fifth-water-breakthrough-challenge/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[3] ibid
