Design of a Water Quality Monitoring Dashboard for a Water Authority in Cross River State

Water quality monitoring in Cross River State relies on infrequent manual sampling and centralised lab testing, limiting the authority's ability to detect contamination events in real time. This study presents the design and implementation of a web-based water quality monitoring dashboard for the Cross River State Water Board, South South Nigeria. The system integrates IoT-based water quality sensors deployed at five sampling points across Calabar and Bakassi pipeline networks, measuring turbidity, pH, chlorine residual, and temperature at 15-minute intervals. Sensor data are transmitted to a cloud-based Node.js and InfluxDB time-series backend via MQTT, and visualised on a React-based dashboard with real-time alerts for out-of-range readings. Development followed Agile Scrum across six two-week sprints. Hardware calibration of the IoT sensors was validated against laboratory reference standards, yielding a maximum measurement deviation of 3.2 percent across all four parameters. Dashboard alert functionality was tested against 50 simulated anomaly events with 100 percent detection accuracy. A three-month operational pilot identified two contamination events (elevated turbidity above 5 NTU) that were resolved within 4 hours following dashboard alerts, compared to a baseline response time of over 72 hours using the previous manual sampling regime. The study recommends extending the sensor network to rural pipeline branches and integrating the dashboard with the State Emergency Management Agency for cross-agency anomaly response.

Keywords: water quality monitoring, IoT sensors, dashboard, Cross River State, real-time monitoring