The story of Digital Waters is a coming together of three individuals who share a unified vision shaped by the same urgency: our water is under threat, and the tools we have to understand it simply aren’t good enough. The three of us were, and still are, driven by a need for immediate action.
For Jason, the spark came close to home. Walking his dog through Toronto’s ravines, he noticed how different Yellow Creek looked from one day to the next. Some days the water ran cloudy, others it smelled strongly of runoff. With a background in software development, product management, and entrepreneurship, Jason began building prototypes of affordable water monitoring devices that could capture those changes in real-time and upload data for analysis. The goal was simple but ambitious: turn fleeting observations into extensive, reliable, continuous baseline data on whole watersheds that communities and decision-makers could act on year-round.
Steve Mann is a respected inventor who has already changed the world through his many inventions and accomplishments, including being the father of wearable computing and inventor of the HDR technology that is in all our phones (check out his official bio or wikipedia page), Steve is also an avid open-water swimmer in Lake Ontario. While swimming along Toronto’s harbor front, he became increasingly concerned about water quality, not just for swimmers but for the ecosystem as a whole. He began experimenting with underwater wearables and new ways of using underwater acoustics to sense and track water quality in real-time. By using AI models built on chirplet transformations, Steve is paving the way for new, low cost systems to detect contaminants in the water in real-time.
Andrew grew up between hurricane-ravaged islands, wetlands, and places where clean water didn’t flow reliably from the tap, he developed a lifelong empathy for how fragile water systems really are. With three decades of embedded systems experience spanning aerospace, medical, environmental, and renewable energy projects, Andrew had spent his career designing resilient, mission-critical technologies. When he and Jason connected through mutual friends, they quickly found common passion in water and technology. The vision of open-source water monitoring across watersheds needed the kind of deep engineering expertise Andrew had to offer.
Among the three of us, our conversations always circle back to water: the local creeks, the harbor, the places we swim and walk and live beside. We compared notes on our projects: Jason’s devices in the ravines, Steve’s acoustic sensors, and Andrew’s engineering systems, and it became clear that our passions weren’t just overlapping, they were complementary. Each of us was approaching the same problem from a different angle.
That was the moment Digital Waters was born. We realized that by merging our efforts, we quickly realized we could build something far more powerful than any one of us could alone: a network of affordable, resilient, and intelligent water monitoring systems. Systems that not only collect continuous data, but also detect contamination events, empower communities, inform researchers, and create the foundation for healthier watersheds everywhere.
The need for better water data is urgent and growing. Our rivers, lakes, and creeks don’t wait for perfect solutions, they change every day, with or without us. Digital Waters exists because three people, coming from different backgrounds but united by the same concern, chose to work together to act now.