Interview: Filip Budny, James Dyson Award 2025 Sustainability Winner

I’ve followed the James Dyson Award since my first year at university. It’s one of the few competitions that truly celebrates problem-solving and engineering with purpose. I wanted to show that environmental technology can be as innovative and impactful as medical or aerospace design. Being among this year’s global winners feels incredible – it proves that protecting water is a challenge the world is ready to take on seriously.

Traditional water monitoring is slow, manual, and reactive. WaterSense makes it continuous, automatic, and predictive. Our AI models can forecast contamination up to 72 hours in advance, giving time to respond before ecosystems collapse.

The sensors are recyclable – both the PET film and the polymer–metal and carbon layers can be separated and recovered through standard recycling processes. In the next development phase, after scaling, we plan to work on replacing the PET substrate with a biodegradable polymer film, maintaining the same electrical, electrochemical and mechanical properties while improving environmental sustainability. 

If mobile network connectivity is temporarily lost, the WaterSense device automatically switches to offline mode. During this time, all measurements are securely stored in local non-volatile memory. Once connection is restored, the system automatically synchronises and uploads all buffered data to the cloud, ensuring no data is lost.

In locations where network is unavailable or unreliable, WaterSense can alternatively communicate via LoRa technology. In this setup, a Long Range (LoRa) gateway is installed on land – typically within a 10 km range from the deployment site – and connected to the Internet via Ethernet, a mobile network, or a satellite network. The data is first transmitted from the floating device to the LoRa receiver, which then securely uploads it to the cloud. This hybrid approach ensures continuous data transmission even in remote areas.

Unlike traditional monitoring providers that sell expensive physical devices, WaterSense offers clients direct access to real-time environmental data through a simple subcription. This will save them the hassle of operating expenses such as hardware purchase, maintenance contracts, and calibration costs.

If a client’s chosen site is not yet covered, WaterSense deploys a new WaterStation there within 14 days, expanding the network dynamically. The result is a scalable, high-margin, low-maintenance business that grows with the number of monitored water bodies, not the number of devices sold.

We are now preparing for the first pre-seed investment round to deploy 140 stations along Poland’s Vistula and Oder rivers and Germany’s Rhine river, covering over 1,600 kilometres of continuous monitoring by the end of 2026. Looking further ahead, our ambition is to expand the network to more than 8,000 stations across Europe’s major rivers – over 160,000 kilometres in total – by 2030.

Our long term goal is to create the world’s first real-time, continent-scale water quality data network to empower institutions, cities, industry and society with precise water quality data, driving the world towards clean inland waters and better future.