HSW

Project

The Human Sensor Web (HSW) is a citizen-reporting system, developed by the University of Twente’s ITC Faculty with the Twente Institute of Mobile Communications and 52°North, that uses SMS to track water availability and quality at public water points in Zanzibar. Piloted with the Zanzibar Water Authority and local partners Zantel and Inet as part of Google.org and UN-Habitat’s h2.0 initiative, the system lets water authority staff, kiosk owners or any member of the community report a broken or contaminated water point by coded text message, triggering a mass SMS alert to registered residents, with electronic meters at selected sites cross-checking the reliability of citizen reports.