Piezo Sensor | Turns Umbrellas Into Rain Gauge

Rolf Hut, a Dutch researcher from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands has developed a 'smart' umbrella equipped with sensors to gather rain data. This prototype umbrella has a Piezo Sensor that detects raindrops falling on its canvas, and uses Bluetooth to send this information via a phone to a computer. 

A Piezo Sensor tracks atmospheric changes like air pressure and converts it to energy. This is placed on the umbrella so it can tell when it's raining. From there the rain data is collected and sent via Bluetooth technology to a smartphone app, then links all its data over the cell network to a laptop for the data to be analysed.

Experiments in the lab and in Hut's back yard during a light shower have delivered some encouraging results. He is getting a reasonable correlation with a proper rain gauge sitting alongside.

"Eventually every umbrella would come with this technology, or at least premium umbrellas would. And if you wanted to be involved, the moment you opened the umbrella, it would start sending data to your phone which uploads it to the cloud," Hut told 'BBC News'.

"We would then have hundreds of rain gauges moving along a cityscape and that could greatly improve our ability to understand urban hydrology; it would greatly improve our ability to predict urban flooding and take measures when things are going bad," Hut added. 

This will not only allow people on the ground to make more accurate and detailed weather prediction, it also shows an interesting development in the CrowdSourced movement in the form of collaborative meteorology.