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