Team:NCKU Tainan/HP/Gold Integrated

Integrated Practice



Purpose

To wave our project into Taiwanese society, the most important thing is to contact potential consumers. Our product is designed and modified in laboratory and adjusted to maximize its best performance. However, we needed the advice from the potential consumers to meet the real-world demands. Thus, in the second part of dialogue, we went to visit an aquaculture farmer. Our ideal interviewee was an aquaculture farmer of Tainan. Fortunately, we contacted Mr. Tsai and have two interviews with him.

Dialogue

Overview

This September 15, we visit the ''Tainan-Tsai'' milk fish restaurant. There were six team members attended and Mr .Tsai treated us a table of dishes in his restaurant. We introduced our project to Mr. Tsai and his friend Mr. Lin, a doctor of aquaculture. Since Mr.Lin have worked as advisor of aquaculture companies, he was quite understanding of our project and he proposed we focus on some part to get our design more fit to the market. Mr. Tsai also told us how they put these theories into practice.

Feedbacks & Integration

They gave us useful advice below

  • After our introduction, they told us that our device suits in fresh-water.
  • Fresh-water fishes are easier to keep and are also more profitable. Further more, fresh-water is more stable than sea water.
  • Fish farmers are searching for a convenient way to detect water quality and it's very important for administration. The difficulty of conventional device is hard to wash, no matter using the solar energy plate to send the data or the detecting device. So if our device could clean-up by itself or design to ‘’ walk back ’’ after screen the water quality, it would help a lot.

How we integrate these information into our project?

  • When we were informed that it's really time consuming to detect all the ponds in the fish farm, we start to consider the possibility of building several passages between fish ponds, allowing our sensing boat to move from one pond to another.
  • Thanks to the suggestion from Mr. Tsai and Mr. Lin, we decided to focus on applying our NO Problem System to a fish farm using fresh water.

These advices were brilliant! Also, they recommended us to find a farm to the our efficiency. We put our little boat in the lake of National Cheng-Kung University now, but if we want to sale our product to the market, definitely we have to test it in the real fish farm.

Visiting the Fish Farm

Guided by Mr. Tsai

The second part of interview, we went to the fish farm of Mr. Tsai. We needed to know the aquaculture environment where our device would be put in. We rode to Sicao, the centeral region of aquaculture industry in Tainan. The farm was for hatching the fry to certain sizes and sell to another farmers. To have good source of water, Mr.Tsai buried pipelines to sea, filtered water and kept it in the reservoir.

Mr. Tsai’s farm could be divided to two parts: The first one was “Greenhouse aquaculture”. Mr. Tsai built the farm himself, which was inside the door and used the idea of greenhouse. "Greenhouse aquaculture" was the latest technique that it was not that popular in Taiwan. The farm would be cool in summer and warm in winter. The second part was the water reservoir. It was the out-door device which kept a lot of water and a motor kept pumping oxygen into the water.

Feedbacks & Integration

What we saw

  • The employee showed us his daily routine: Feeding the fishes
  • The aquaculture farm have to test the water quality every week: the government department will set up a analyzing center, and the aquaculture farmer need to put their water in the tube and send to the center, testing for several index, including pH value, nitrate level, oxygen level, and temperature. These four index are necessary for fish farmers to monitor the condition of fish pond.
  • They can also test their nitrate concentration by themselves: they use a tiny tube, drop water into it and observe the color changing of tube with bare eye. But they seldom use it since it is actually inaccurate and lack of sensitivity.
  • The experienced employee can tell if the water quality is good or not by just using their eyes. They observe the color of water and the activity of fishes to judge.

How we Integrate these information into our project?

  • We realized that detecting nitrate level is not enough for practical use in the real fish farm, therefore we decided to combine pH meter and thermometer into our sensing boat.

Thanks to Mr. Tsai and Mr. Lin, all the information and suggestions are very important, allowing us to push our project even more close to the true need for practical use in real fish farm.

Public engagement

Questionnaire

Besides the dialogue with aquaculture farmer, we did the public engagement to understand the thought of consumer. We designed a questionnaire which target on people’s habit of buying seafood. We delivered this questionnaire person by person and through the way of street interview instead of giving the questionnaire form to write. In the end of interview, we also introduced our project to them.

According to the questionnaires, we want to know whether the consumer's purchase intention will be enhanced by water quality data provided by aquaculture industry. Accordingly, we use sign test to test it.

    Feedbacks & Integration

  • H0: Less than or equal to 50% people’s purchase intention will be enhanced by water quality data provided from aquaculture industry.
  • H1: more than 50% of people’s purchase intention will be enhanced by water quality data provided from aquaculture industry.
  • N=37, α=0.01
  • T=33
  • p-value= 0.0000005 0.01

We reject null hypothesis and conclude that the consumer's purchase intention will be enhanced by water quality data provided from aquaculture industry at a significant level = 0.01.

Thus, our device is useful to keep providing water quality data of aquaculture industry. If we put this data online, the consumers can check the water quality of food they buy, and enhance their purchase intention. In this perspective, our design of detecting nitrates concentration and put this online seems to be a very good part that closely relates to our daily life.