Meet the Water Canary Sonaar Luthra

cholera was reported in Haiti for the

first time in over 50 years last October

there was no way to predict how far it

would spread through water supplies and

how bad the situation would get and not

knowing where help was needed always

ensured that help was in short supply in

the areas that needed it most we’ve

gotten good at predicting and preparing

for storms before they take innocent

lives and cause irreversible damage but

we still can’t do that with water and

here’s why right now if you want to test

water in the field you need a trained

technician expensive equipment like this

and you have to wait about a day for

chemical reactions take place and

provide results it’s too slow to get a

picture of conditions on the ground

before they change too expensive to

implement in all the places that require

testing and it ignores the fact that in

the meanwhile people still need to drink

water most of the information that we

collected on the cholera outbreak didn’t

come from testing water it came from

forms like this which documented all the

people we fail to help countless lives

have been saved by Canaries and coal

mines a simple and invaluable way for

miners to know whether they’re safe I’ve

been inspired by that simplicity as I’ve

been working on this problem with some

of the most hardworking and brilliant

people I’ve ever known we think there’s

a simpler solution this problem one that

can be used by people who face

conditions like this every day it’s in

its early stages but this is what it

looks like right now we call it the

water canary it’s a fast cheap device

that answers an important question is

this water contaminated it doesn’t

require any special training and instead

of waiting for chemical reactions to

take place it uses light that means

there’s no waiting for chemical

reactions to take place no need to use

reagents that can run out and no need to

be an expert to get actionable

information to test water you simply

insert a sample within seconds it

displays either a red light indicating

contaminated water

or green light indicating the sample is

safe this will make it possible for

anyone to collect life-saving

information and to monitor water quality

conditions as they unfold we’re also on

top of that integrating wireless

networking into an affordable device

with gps and gsm what that means is that

each reading can be automatically

transmitted as servers will be mapped in

real-time with enough users maps like

this will make it possible take

preventive action containing hazards

before they turn into emergencies that

take years to recover from and then

instead of taking days disseminate this

information to the people who need it

most it can happen automatically we’ve

seen how distributed networks big data

and information can transform society I

think it’s time for us to apply them to

water our goal over the next year is to

get water canary ready for the field and

it opens source the hardware so that

anyone can contribute to the development

and the evaluation so we can tackle this

problem together thank

you