A recent study demonstrates a substantial improvement in safe drinking water availability when an AI-based tool developed by York University researchers is used to optimize chlorination levels in refugee camp water supplies. Lead author Syed Imran Ali asserts that the new findings show the Safe Water Optimization Tool (SWOT) greatly surpasses conventional guidelines for ensuring safe water supply in humanitarian operations.
"Our investigation found that SWOT can provide safe drinking water at nearly three times the rate compared to traditional methods, supporting a growing body of evidence highlighting its high effectiveness in various situations," says Ali, who is the director of the Humanitarian Water Engineering Lab at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and an adjunct professor at the Lassonde School of Engineering.
"As humanitarian efforts face increasingly difficult conditions and financial strain, there's a growing need for evidence-based solutions like SWOT."
For this study, published in BMJ Global Health, researchers analyzed regular water-quality data from an ongoing humanitarian response at the Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee settlement in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh where SWOT had been employed. They discovered that households following SWOT guidelines met safety standards 90% of the time, compared to just 35% with conventional universal guidelines used in humanitarian contexts.
BMJ Global HealthThe study also revealed that for maximum impact of this intervention, water monitoring teams and treatment operations must work together to determine optimized chlorination levels.
"One of the challenges is ensuring water system operators have adequate support to improve communication between monitoring and water treatment."
Other authors on this paper and fellow SWOT collaborators include machine learning lead Professor Usman T. Khan from Lassonde's Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Health Associate Professor Tarra Penney, Ph.D. candidate Mike De Santi, former Dahdaleh director Dr. James Orbinski, SWOT technical advisor Matt Arnold, SWOT data science specialist Syed Saad Ali, and Jean-François Fesselet with the public health department at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Holland.
The SWOT is a free, open-source online tool that Ali created after working as a water and sanitation specialist in South Sudan with MSF. Ali and his team realized that widely-used universal water chlorination guidelines in the humanitarian sector were flawed. They collaborated with York researchers and MSF to create a tool that helps aid workers generate site-specific, evidence-based chlorination levels in refugee camps using only routine monitoring data.
Since its inception, SWOT has helped provide safe water for over 700,000 people worldwide, including recent collaborations in Yemen, Gaza, and Uganda where Ali witnessed firsthand the impact of significant U.S. government funding cuts to humanitarian efforts.
"Global humanitarian systems are rapidly deteriorating, operating under extremely challenging conditions," says Ali. "There's now pressure with reduced resources to ensure interventions are evidence-based and effectively proven, and that's exactly what SWOT does for safe water systems."