Our Journey
Aquarius™ began in 2021 as a university project that started because we were passionate about swimming, bodyboarding and surfing and were tired of worrying about getting sick from enjoying our passion. We wondered if there was an easier and faster way to test bathing waters and provide reliable data to the public which the government and environment agency were not doing.
Now, a year and a half later, Aquarius™ has developed into a portable and reliable water quality tester that can tell users the quality of their local bathing waters within minutes and make the data accessible to the wider public.
Driven by Research
Aquarius™ is trying to solve a real-world and very techincal problem that can be influenced by many different environmental factors. That meant a lot of research went into the initial phase of our journey to find the route causes of the problem, researching the environmental and human factors that can influence sewage contamination, interviewing experts in the field of water quality and, benchmarking the current testers on the market aimed at environment agencies throughout the western world.
Once we were satisfied that we could develop a product to solve this problem, we then iterated many, many times to find different solutions to this problem as well as different methods of integrating the ground- breaking technology that is microfluidics. We often had to go back to the drawing board and relied on users to help guide us towards the best solution, which is one that solves the problem effectively whilst providing beneficial feedback and feelings to the user.
Developed through Testing
Aquarius™ was developed through extensive testing. This included user testing of working prototypes to ensure the usability and interaction with the product was suitable for it's environment and the best it could be. Water sample testing was conducted in laboratory environments to ensure the interal components of Aquarius™ carry out their intended role as well as work within a whole system that can provide feedback on the water quality to the user.
Built to Last
Aquarius™ is built on the idea of protecting our bathing waters and their environments so it only makes sense for the Aquarius™ device to be designed and manufactured with sustainability at it's core. The device casing is made from recycled ocean plastic, such as abandoned fishing gear and single use plastic items. The design of Aquarius™ considers the user's right to repair throughout the entire device, all elements of the device are servicable, so broken components can be repaired or replaced rather than having to dispose of the whole device. At the end of Aquarius™'s useful life we will take back the device, we assess all used devices to recover as much material as possible, useful components are collected for servicing devices and the rest of the components are recycled into useful materials that can go into other products.
