Hardware, apps, and surveys at scale

Abstract

The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales introduce complexities and risks that can be difficult for a research team to anticipate. Over the past year, our interdisciplinary team of engineers and economists has been designing, deploying, and operating a large sensor network in Accra, Ghana that measures power outages and quality at households and firms. This network consists of 457 custom sensors, over 3,000 mobile app instances, thousands of participant surveys, and custom user incentive and deployment management systems. In part, this deployment supports an evaluation of the impacts of investments in the grid on reliability and the subsequent effects of improvements in reliability on socioeconomic well-being. We report our experiences as we move from performing small pilot deployments to our current scale, attempting to identify the pain points at each stage of the deployment. Finally, we extract high-level observations and lessons learned from our deployment activities, which we wish we had originally known when forecasting budgets, human resources, and project timelines. These insights will be critical as we look toward scaling our deployment to the entire city of Accra and beyond, and we hope that they will encourage and support other researchers looking to measure highly granular information about our world's critical systems. CCS CONCEPTS • Hardware → Sensor applications and deployments; Energy metering; • Social and professional topics → Systems development; System management.

Donor Contracting Conditions and Public Procurement: Causal Evidence from Kenyan Electrification

“…Improved construction quality could reduce local power outages and increase reliability, which could have tangible benefits for household well-being and firm performance. To measure reliability and voltage we deployed the GridWatch technology (Klugman et al 2021;Klugman et al 2019) in a subset of surveyed households and firms. GridWatch measures minute-by-minute power state and voltage and can be installed by plugging a PowerWatch device (Figure A6) into a power outlet.…”