“Water Canary™”

The Water Canary is an instantaneous low‐cost testing device that radically reduces the amount of time, expense, and skill required to test untreated or inadequately treated water for pathogens. Representing a dramatic step forward for water testing, the Water Canary will have a revolutionary impact upon international public health and, most significantly, disaster relief efforts.

The Water Canary's innovative use of inexpensive UV light technology reduces to seconds the testing time for disease‐causing pathogens and thereby lowers the cost per test to a small fraction of current solutions. Additionally, the Water Canary requires minimal training for its operator allowing widespread use in less developed parts of the world during crisis and humanitarian situations. With the press of a button, anyone, anywhere in the world can know almost instantaneously whether their water is free of pathogens. Moments later, those organizations tasked with distributing life‐saving water supplies will be able to plan and evaluate logistical efforts based on real time data.

Immediately following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, UNICEF's first priority was to bring in large quantities of clean drinking water. By February 3rd, UNICEF had launched a massive children's immunization campaign against the spread of water‐born illnesses that typically accompany a post‐ disaster situation. Not until February 4th was UNICEF distributing 2.6 million liters of water a day to an estimated 500,000 people. Even with UNICEF's vast logistic machine and that of its partner NGOs, government agencies and private companies, it still took 25 days to reach this level of disaster response.

Existing water testing equipment is ill‐equipped to provide timely and widespread contamination information to the logistics chain. During emergencies the number of necessary test sites increase exponentially and humanitarian logistics operations become the focal point of successful disaster response. At the same time, the price, time and skill required by present water‐testing technologies greatly impede the speed and effectiveness of humanitarian response.

Water Canary's mission is to provide an inexpensive, easily accessible solution to the problem of emergency water potability testing. We aim to eliminate the difficulty of obtaining robust information about drinking water safety that hampers disaster mitigation and limits long‐term relief efforts to improve access to reliable sources of safe water. We believe that by building a for‐profit business around our technological innovation, we will achieve both the scale of social impact that we desire and the financial sustainability that will enable us to provide products and services that will save lives.

The product of a close collaboration between UNICEF's Innovations Lab and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Water Canary is currently in 4th prototype on a path towards a 150 unit field test phase in 2010. We aim to offer a device that requires an absolute minimum amount of training, can be broadly and easily distributed by multiple NGO partners, and transmits data via the most available network option. Our data collection software aims to distribute the data widely in multiple formats, and provide a geographically relevant and actionable visual analysis.

Water Canary is a simple, accurate, and low cost diagnostic tool for testing the potability of drinking water. Products currently on the market for testing water are costly, time‐ intensive, and usually require skill to administer. Combined with a software package that collects, maps, and analyzes the geo-tagged data from each test, Water Canary is both a physical device for water testing and a system for publishing and sharing this data. It is easily transportable, requires no external power source or chemical consumables, and fits in one hand.

As a complete first‐response solution, Water Canary offers governments and aid organizations the ability to isolate troubled areas in a water emergency before deploying aid resources, while taking advantage of a networked communications strategy that enables the data from readings to be transmitted over any available network. It will enable any worker to play a critical role in mapping contaminated water sources accurately and efficiently, yet will not require any special training to operate. Water Canary will transform the capacity of aid organizations to diagnose and solve water‐ related problems, and ultimately save lives.

The technology behind the Water Canary is based on a revolutionary approach to the spectral analysis of liquids that allows the Water Canary to deliver functionality comparable to laboratory‐grade equipment. The technology was developed by NYU ITP Scientist in Residence, Eric Rosenthal CEO of Creative Technology, LLC, the inventor and owner of this patented process.

Link to Water Canary web site