Shower With Friends Fights The Drought, Wins TCDisrupt Using Twilio and The Internet of Things

Shower With Friends Fights The Drought, Wins TCDisrupt Using Twilio and The Internet of Things

The California drought is dire, currently affecting 37,253,959 people. Governments, scientists, cities and towns are all working tirelessly to save water. This past weekend a team of five people at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hackathon built a Twilio app to give Californians a new way to  combat the drought and make saving water fun.

Don’t take Shower With Friends’ name literally. They’re not proposing you open you shower door up for everyone. The solution is designed to inform you about your own water consumption habits, and motivate you to improve them by competing with friends, family and yourself.

Using an Intel Galileo Gen 2 Board and water flow sensor, and Twilio SMS API, the solution monitors your water consumption habits and sends you a text message before you shower, motivating you to beat your previous record of low water consumption.

Watch the demo from Shower With Friends, courtesy of TechCrunch below

Companies like SmartThings, SmarterKey and others leverage the power of the Internet of Things to make everyday devices controllable and programmable. This is one of the first cases we’ve seen of a company, or more accurately, group of talented developers leverage that network to spark civic and environmental change. Congrats to the Shower With Friends crew, and all the teams that competed at TC Disrupt .