Neuvecelle Project

Back in 2020, at the height of COVID-19, Droople collaborated with Vivalys, a forward-thinking school, to introduce Smart Sanitation – a solution to both improve hygiene and raise awareness on pressing water issues. With this pilot project showing great success, Droople later partnered with kindergarten and primary classes within Robert Magnin School Group in Neuvecelle, Switzerland to develop another pilot site. 

The Droople Smart Sanitation solution is two-fold, serving as an educational and operational tool. Firstly, it promotes good hygiene practices amongst students through the integration of reinforced behavioral changes and raises their awareness regarding water usage. Secondly, it helps facility managers monitor points of use, detect leaks and blocked flushes, and understand water consumption patterns to improve efficiency.

Gamification with the introduction of a hygiene score

What is a hygiene score? It is a way for us to quantify just how well the kids are washing their hands, while at the same time taking into account how much water they are using versus how much they actually need. To create this score, we assume an ideal scenario in which it takes a ratio of two cycles of handwashing – with a soap break in between – for one flush. This scenario results in a score of 10. A hygiene score of less than 10 indicates that the ratio was not respected and there were less than two hand washes for each flush.

To reach the best hygiene scores, the students were incentivized to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds (more than 20s is green) – and simultaneously save water in the process (if they stop running water during hand wash, the hygiene score increases, if not it decreases). The data collected in real-time, were displayed on the screen in the school hall in the form of user-friendly statistics.

In this way, the school hygiene score is constantly influenced by everyone depending on whether both hygiene and water savings measures are implemented.

The students at Neuvecelle really took to the challenge, keeping the score very close to 10 during the academic year. 

Learnings for Leadership Staff

As the students are learning, so is the leadership and maintenance staff. On a macro scale, the data revealed an average decline of 22% in water consumption from one year to the next at Neuvecelle. Staff have the opportunity to look back at the year and evaluate what water strategies worked and what they can do moving forward to make even more progress. On a micro scale, maintenance staff has a detailed view of each water asset. Our sensors collect data from each and every toilet, checking how much water is consumed on each flush. By calculating the average of this consumption per cycle, we can compare the assets with each other and identify those that have a higher average consumption per flush. Take a look at the table on the right – we can see in this snapshot that Toilets 8 and 14 consume more on average than the others. We can also check if the average flow rate of a flush is systematically higher over time.  This information allows for possible water savings by adjusting the flow rates of these particular toilets. Another actionable insight involves the detection of ghost flushing, a phenomenon where water continues to flow at night. The results from these schools were reassuring: no restroom showed nocturnal consumption.

"After two years of operation, Droople technology enabled behavioral change within the students community. They are now aware of their hand hygiene habits and water consumption behaviors during their day-to-day routine. Optimal hand hygiene score with reduced water usage are now tracked while water assets are tracked as well, enabling the early detection of failures, leakage. The operation team can now implement water efficiency on water-intensive assets. Thank you to Mathieu Maréchal who mined all the data collected to showcase those great results!" said Ramzi Bouzerda, Drooplet in Chief at Droople.