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Instantly Detecting Pathogens in Drinking Water & Alerting the Community

An innovative process to instantly detect pathogens such as E. coli in water - and to let everyone in the area know through cellphone networks - is being tested in India and northern Canada. Sushanta Mitra, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta, developed the sensor technology. The sensor is a filter that traps E. coli and changes color in the presence of the deadly bacteria. It takes anywhere from two to twenty minutes, based on the level of contamination. In India, over 37 million people are struck by diseases coming from contaminated water, and in 2005 Canada's public health agency reported more than 4,000 cases of giardiasis - a parasitic, waterborne disease that can be fatal for young children and seniors.

Topics:
Communications Computers Detectors Electronics & Computers Medical Sensors Wireless

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    Transcript

    00:00:06 it's a new technology that promises to make drinking water safer for hundreds of millions around the world sushanta mitra a professor of mechanical engineering at the university of alberta has developed a system for quickly detecting e coli bacteria in water sources instantly spreading the word to vast

    00:00:24 numbers of people through cell phone networks from any water source be it water tap water we take 100 ml of water put it into our m water kit if there is an e coli it will do a color change on that kit on the sensor surface and that sensor surface we take an image with our cell phone

    00:00:44 which has an app running e coli app and then that image is get transmitted to a server which will tell to the end user that there is an e-coli outbreak if there is and if there's not it is safe to drink the water and so on typically a traditional system will take 24 to 48 hours but our technology based on the

    00:01:04 level of contamination anywhere between two minutes to 20 minutes we can detect mitra and his team have successfully completed two field trials in small impoverished communities just outside the city of mumbai in india the next step is to test it inside india's most populous city where it could impact millions in april we're

    00:01:26 going into a municipality in mumbai where it is millions of people are accessing the water and we want to show that this technology is equally applicable to not only to the small communities but as a scale-up operation for municipalities as well we're talking about uh you know close to 400 500 millions of people

    00:01:45 in this kind of large country like india china and so on through a u of a sponsored initiative called engage north mitra is now also introducing his e coli detection system to canada's northern communities where clean safe water is often as hard to come by as in developing countries like india

    00:02:03 we are trying to connect our undergraduate students of graduate students with the communities in the north so last summer we have a lot of interaction with the community in pentington in nanoworth and right now we are working with two more communities denny communities it has a huge amount of impact in terms of public health

    00:02:27 access to clean and safe drinking water is a global problem and what we are doing we are empowering those bottom billion people telling that they can individually can decide what water is safe for them