Canary in the Coal Mine, Meet the Fish in the Reservoir!

New York and San Francisco have begun using the IAC 1090 Intelligent Aquatic BioMonitoring System (iABS) developed by Intelligent Automation Corporation (IAC) of Poway, CA to protect public drinking water from contamination and potential terrorism incidents. The system is also being used by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, MD, a development partner for the system along with the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research (USACEHR), The US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Defense Legacy Program. The key to this whole system? Well, a neural network processor, and… fish. Bluegill sunfish, to be precise (for Europeans: similar to Bream). IAC’s release notes that the aquatic biomonitoring is actually a pretty mature technology with a 30 year history. The challenge here was to combine that work with state of the art IT and automation technologies, and create a workable system. Should the fish detect toxic conditions, an alarm is triggered and the IAC 1090 is prompted to immediately take a series of water samples. In addition, the system automatically notifies appropriate staff by phone or email, and may even shut off the water entirely in certain circumstances. The system can operate in a networked or standalone configuration, is […]