Water and Air Measures That Make ‘PureSense’
Environment and Resource
Management
Originating Technology/ NASA Contribution
Each day, we read about mounting global concerns
regarding the ability to sustain supplies of clean
water and to reduce air contamination. With
water and air serving as life’s most vital elements,
it is important to know when these environmental
necessities may be contaminated, in order to eliminate
exposure immediately.
The ability to respond requires an understanding
of the conditions impacting safety and quality,
from source to tap for water, and from outdoor
to indoor environments for air. Unfortunately,
the “time-to-know” is not immediate with many current
technologies, which is a major problem, given the
greater likelihood of risky situations in today’s
world.
Accelerating alert and response times requires
new tools, methods, and technologies. New solutions
are needed to engage in more rapid detection, analysis,
and response. This is the focus of a company called
PureSense Environmental,
Inc., which evolved out
of a unique relationship with NASA.
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PureSense Environmental,
Inc., provides customers in commercial and municipal
markets with real-time solutions to detect, know,
and respond to critical changes in the quality
of water and air. |
The need for real-time management and operations
over the quality of water and air, and the urgency
to provide new solutions, were reinforced by the
events of September 11, 2001. This, and subsequent
events, exposed many of the vulnerabilities facing
the multiple agencies tasked with working in tandem
to protect communities from harmful disaster. Much
has been done since September 11 to accelerate
responses to environmental contamination. Partnerships
were forged across the public and private sectors
to explore, test, and use new tools. Methods and
technologies were adopted to move more astutely
from proof-of-concept to working solutions.
NASA was, and continues to be, involved in a number
of these efforts, drawing on support from its experience
and expertise with complex systems, advanced
technologies, and environmental sciences. The founders
of PureSense originally approached NASA to position
the Agency’s expertise and technologies into inter-agency
exercises directed at improving the protection
and security of water systems and response to emergencies
impacting water and air. These exercises and the
subsequent partnership between NASA and PureSense
helped to launch a unique solution for accelerating
alert time and quickening the ability to respond.
In the spring of 2002, NASA and several of the
eventual founders of PureSense sponsored a series
of work sessions for emergency response and water
system agencies, with representation from a wide
variety of Federal, state, local, and first-response
officials. The sessions focused on understanding
how to deal more effectively with bioterrorist
attacks.
The would-be founders of PureSense brought experience
in building and using multidisciplinary applications
of real-time intelligence systems and communications
technology; these were integrated into a proof-of-concept
hardware and software system application to support
collaborative surveillance, detection, response,
and recovery. The system demonstrated several of
NASA’s remote-sensing, advanced data-analysis, simulation,
and scientific data-visualization technologies and
repurposed them alongside other technologies and
applications to facilitate cohesive, rapid decision-making
across the agencies.
These experiences, coupled with a dedication to
prevent water and air contamination from harming
people and infrastructure, ultimately led to the
launch of the PureSense company. PureSense, with
the help of the NASA Technology Partnerships Division,
initially opened an office on the NASA Research
Park campus at Ames Research Center. The company
recently moved to Emeryville, California, and continues
to collaborate with NASA in bringing the Agency’s
expertise in several areas to projects concerned
with homeland security.
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Understanding
how to deal more effectively with bioterrorist
attacks: PureSense Environmental, Inc., signed
two Space Act Agreements in 2003, to support
the NASA mission to “protect our home planet,”
and a Cooperative Agreement in 2004, to collaborate
on U.S. Department of Homeland Security projects
designed to ensure the security of the Nation’s
water systems. |
Today, PureSense is providing customers in the
commercial and municipal markets with the first
cost-effective online service to detect, know,
and respond immediately to critical changes in
the quality of water and air, and to do so in real
time. PureSense hardware and related firmware first
integrate diverse remote sensors, instruments,
and remediation technologies, and then network
them for continuous, standard data acquisition.
Additionally, PureSense software applications perform
data integration, validation, and analysis to provide
customers with continuous intelligence on critical
conditions over secure communication channels and
via multiple types of communication devices. Included
in the analytical data model are data-mining algorithms
developed by the company’s founders, in collaboration
with scientists at NASA. These algorithms have
been repurposed and integrated into PureSense’s
air and water system-monitoring software product,
known as the PureSense Environmental Resource Management
(ERM) Solution.
Partnership
The PureSense founders, including team members
who at one time worked in Ames’s Biomedical Visualization
and Gravitational Research laboratories, worked
to reinforce the NASA-PureSense partnership through
the signing of two Space Act Agreements in 2003,
designed to support the NASA mission to “protect
our home planet.” Specifically, these agreements
were designed to support the evaluation of NASA
data-mining algorithms for incorporation in the
analytics engine that is a component of
the PureSense ERM Solution. These algorithms help
NASA remotely monitor the physiological health
of
astronauts, evaluate atmospheric changes on Earth,
conduct aviation system analysis, and discover
and understand new galaxies.
The Space Act Agreements also led to PureSense
partnering with the Agency’s scientists on emergency-response
protocols, software systems, and advanced data
analysis. Equally important, this type of partnering
helps PureSense to generate recognition in the
environmental industry for relevant NASA research
and development capabilities while also supporting
NASA in its relationships with other government
agencies, national laboratories, and key industry
players concerned with the Nation’s water and air
quality. Subsequently, in 2004, PureSense signed
a Cooperative Agreement with Ames to collaborate
on U.S. Department of Homeland Security projects
designed to ensure the security of the Nation’s
water systems. PureSense has also collaborated
with NASA on projects to develop and improve techniques
and tools used in urban search and rescue.
Product Outcome
Industry and the public are facing a rising tide
of costs associated with the contamination of air
and water. For example, in 2004, Chiron Corporation
was unable to meet its flu vaccine production commitments
due to microbial cross-contamination in a manufacturing
facility. After an estimated $300 million loss
in enterprise value and 6 months of plant downtime,
the company regained its license to produce flu
vaccine for 2005. Also, beverage companies have
lost millions of dollars annually worldwide, as
contamination during production has led to product
recalls (e.g., The Coca-Cola Company’s Dasani purified
water was recalled after levels of bromate were
found to exceed legal levels); lost inventory;
and damaged brand identity. In 1990, North Carolina
regulators issued a report stating that Perrier’s
bottled water was contaminated with benzene, a
poisonous liquid shown to cause cancer in laboratory
animals. Perrier attributed the contamination to
an isolated incident, in which workers failed to
filter out the benzene—which the company said is
naturally present in carbon dioxide—during the
filtration process.)
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The PureSense
Application Suite integrates four core product
components (middle), fed by multiple data sources,
to provide an information and communication platform,
which produces comprehensive, real-time analysis
of water and air quality for rapid detection,
predictive analysis, and focused action. |
In addition, U.S. hospitals incur $5 billion per
year in direct costs from the transmission of infections
inside their facilities that cause patients to
become ill. Moreover, “sick building syndrome”
in office buildings produces $30 billion to $50
billion per year in related health
care costs and lost employee productivity in America.
The State of California estimates that poor indoor
air
quality in non-industrial settings costs the economy
$45 billion a year. Further, annual costs of asthma
in the United States are estimated to be $18 billion,
with $10 billion in direct costs, and another $3
billion in lost
productivity from 15 million missed or lost work
days.
These experiences are more and more common as current
practices in environmental monitoring fail to prevent
problems from occurring.
PureSense’s cost-effective ERM systems are shaping
up to be the answer to the health and monetary
issues affecting both industry and the public.
PureSense’s NASA-inspired solution helps transform
the management of water and air from periodic batch
processing to continuous, real-time understanding,
based on automated, system-wide monitoring of environmental
conditions.
The PureSense ERM Solution consists of a unique
combination of hardware and software applications
(known as the PureSense Application Suite) with
the ability to access and aggregate data from multiple
sensors and other data sources, add value to the
data through analysis, and supply on-demand intelligence
to users anytime, anywhere.
Four core components are fed by multiple data sources
to
provide an information and communications platform
and produce comprehensive, real-time analysis of
water and air quality for rapid detection, predictive
analysis, and focused action.
The first component is a “pervasive computing”
device, called the PureSense iNode, which provides
two-way communication with existing or future air
or water sensors. The iNode pre-processes information
and transmits it over highly secured wireless connections
to a centralized data center. The second component
is a real-time data-collection network called the
PureSense Data Model that, according to the company,
gathers data faster and more economically than
current “grab sample” methods (involving manual
collection of samples for laboratory analysis)
and enables the integration of disparate data sets
from multiple sources. The third component, the
PureSense Analyzer, employs sophisticated algorithms
and NASA-influenced data-mining techniques to correlate
multiple streams of data to produce real-time alerts
and other analyses regarding environmental conditions.
The fourth component, the PureSense Dashboard,
is tailored to individual user profiles and communicates
critical, real-time analysis to users in a timely
manner. In the water industry, this is the powerful,
role-based response system that keeps all responsible
parties informed about key changes in water quality.
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PureSense
Environmental, Inc., has collaborated with NASA
on projects to develop and improve techniques
and tools used in urban search and rescue. To
the left, first-response officials work together
during a collapsed building exercise. |
PureSense has developed aggressively over the last
year, creating customer traction and new projects
on the national level, with the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency and the Department of Homeland
Security, among others. The company chose municipal
drinking water as the best avenue for commercialization
of existing NASA technologies and has already completed
initial customer installations. Early endorsements
for the PureSense ERM Solution have been received
from some of the Nation’s largest water companies,
including the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power, the second-largest municipal water company
in the United States, and several other water companies
that each serve over a million customers, including
the East Bay Municipal Utility District, the Las
Vegas Valley Water District, and the San Jose Water
Company.
PureSense is currently expanding the capabilities
of the PureSense ERM Solution for faster analysis
and remediation in new vertical markets. The initial
expansion includes hospitals and biopharmaceutical
manufacturing, where it can help mitigate infectious
disease incidences and, hence, drive down operational
risks and associated costs. PureSense is now working
with one of the largest hospital systems in California
to adapt the PureSense ERM Solution for indoor
air quality management. The company is also exploring
interest from the food and beverage industries,
where it can help minimize downtime and materials
spoilage.
The partnership between NASA and PureSense has
resulted in a business that is poised to have a
dramatic impact on many different industries and
on the lives of many people, with the potential
to revolutionize environmental monitoring and control.
PureSense® is a registered trademark of PureSense
Environmental, Inc.
Environmental Resource Management,™ PureSense iNode,™
PureSense Data Model,™ PureSense Analyzer,™ and PureSense
Dashboard,™ are trademarks of PureSense Environmental,
Inc.
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