BODOQUE: An Energy-Efficient Flow Monitoring System for Ephemeral Streams

Effective environmental monitoring is crucial for managing global environmental challenges and providing the necessary data for Environmental Intelligence (EI). This discipline involves the integration of data from various sources to gain a comprehensive understanding of specific regions or processes. In this paper, we introduce BODOQUE, a hardware-software infrastructure to monitor water flows in ephemeral streams where the water rarely flows with great force. BODOQUE uses a low-power TinyML-based camera to detect the presence of water, activating a more complex system to measure flow only when the water flows, thereby optimizing energy consumption. This device is being deployed in the Segura basin, Murcia, Spain. This region is grappling with severe environmental issues that affect the Mar Menor, a unique saltwater lagoon. This paper focuses on the power-saving capabilities of BODOQUE, comparing the energy consumption of different edge devices running the code that measures water flow in the streams. Our goal is to determine the optimal hardware setup for the system based on our experiments, which involve performance and energy consumption tests. The results provide valuable information for future environmental monitoring systems, considering the best balance among the device's cost, performance, and energy consumption.