Monitoring and managing water quality in Saudi Arabia is essential for protecting public health and ensuring a clean water supply to households and industries. Bacteria have become a significant concern, as they can lead to health issues and impact water quality. There are several conventional methods to characterize water quality and measure the concentration of pollutants such as metal particles and microorganisms such as bacteria. Although these conventional methods offer measurements with high sensitivity and selectivity, they have the disadvantage of being slow and requiring a laboratory environment to run quality tests. This summary reports a portable detection system that enables a real-time determination of different types of bacteria in drinking water. Furthermore, the system can be integrated into the current water supply infrastructure and support remote sensing and transfer detection 

data over network channels. The novelty of this work is utilizing a non-uniform electric field generated by microelectrodes to separate bacteria in a microfluidic channel prior to sensing. The sensing system also has a circuit unit to control, monitor, and transfer detection data over network channels supporting remote sensing. The work serves KFUPM’s grand challenges by developing an advanced, integrated, and smart environmental surveillance network that monitors the presence of bacteria in drinking water in real-time.