Clockworks

Read all water, gas and electricity meters automatically with a mobile phone camera

Registering and passing on meter readings is still done manually. Once a year, the customer heads to their cellar or kitchen cupboard or goes in search of the water meter. But some meters are difficult to access, especially for the elderly and the disabled. Moreover, reading meters in dark, dirty environments is customer-unfriendly and 5-10% of readings are incorrect. Having to re-read a meter is time-consuming and causes irritation but also leads to additional costs for the network operator, particularly when field staff have to visit the customer to take the correct reading. In the Netherlands, this still happens in approximately 5% of cases. Is there no other way to do this? There is, and the solution is ingenious.

Clockworks has devised a new failproof way to automatically read all water, gas and electricity meters with a mobile phone camera. The technology also immediately records the brand, model and meter number. Passing on meter readings thus becomes more customer-friendly and much less prone to errors and fraud. Clockworks is using techniques from the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence – such as deep learning – to develop image recognition software.