Fighting Wildire with IoT: Sensors, Cameras & Software

26 wildfires are burning in Colorado, where sites like this have become the norm. Many agree that IoT can play a powerful role in mitigating these disasters, but poor connectivity has largely prevented rural areas like this from benefiting. Can a new solution called the N5 Shield change that? It's essentially an end -to -end solution that is powered by our sensors. The sensor node has got three sensing modalities. One is a heat signature sensor, IR heat signature. The other one is a smoke and particulate matter detection module based on laser. The third one is our N5's proprietary gas and chemical sensor detector array. Then the AI kind of fuses the data. from all these different sensing modalities to make the accurate prediction of a fire. And it uses both types of communication capabilities, whether LTE and LoRa. Places where you don't have LTE, it uses LoRa. Last year, Gilpin County in Colorado put the solution to the test. The county deployed five prototypes in areas that had little to no cell service. Many were deployed on power poles or mounted I mean, the sensors picked up the heat, picked up the emissions, picked up the particulates, sent us an alert back to my emergency operations center saying, hey, sensor 42 is picking this up. But crews were surprised when the system picked up another alert hours later, about a mile or so away. So it was kind of a unique analysis because we were able to say, look, if this sensor is picking this up now, this sensor is picking. up now can we calculate the rate of speed of the fire but now we also know which direction it's going the county which often relies upon 9 -1 -1 calls to learn about fire says the sensors notified the crews about 36 minutes faster than traditional methods you know we were potentially able to save lives at that point in time the sensors can also track air quality which is rarely monitored at a hyper-local level especially in remote areas like gilpin county and five Five says the sensors are capable of running seven to ten days on a single charge with a lifespan of anywhere from five to seven years. And Five says that while cost can vary, the solution is similar to the price of an expensive smartphone. That's much cheaper than other camera -enabled solutions, which cost tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars. You know, cameras do have some advantages. They've been used throughout California, a little bit in some of the other western states. But these are multi-million dollars. systems that get deployed on huge infrastructure so it's a it's a big deal to go out and put up a camera um by comparison i can set up an n5 sensor in my backyard we can drive out to a county and you know start putting them out really easily but critics wonder how many sensors of that do you need to cover that area when you need to change batteries because those systems works with batteries how the work to do that. If there is a fire, that system, they all burn. You need to change all of that. Now, M5 sensors are capable of detecting a fire within a one to two mile distance, but of course that depends upon the local geography. Jean-Mate Tos, who you just heard from, works for the Portuguese company Futur Compta, whose B2 fire detection system uses a combination of optical sensors, a thermal chamber, and AI to detect fires, but its detection area is much larger. spanning about 14 miles because of those cameras. We use AI technology with optical analysis. We use thermal technology analyzing the way that the heat behaves. And we also use spectrometric analysis. That is a technology that we developed and we have the patent for that, which analyzes the chemical of the atmosphere and can say to the... system if there is smoke in the atmosphere or not. We can use satellite, we can use WiMAX links, Wi -Fi links, we can use GSM, 4G, 5G, whatever we have available. Usually when we are in rural areas we can use, you have a network with different systems and we create a network between them and maybe one of them will have some way to put the signal in the internet or in 4G or in satellite. Zhao adds that connectivity is a much bigger challenge in the States than other parts of In Europe, it's easier because the cities are more near one of the others. So it's needed to have communications from one side or the other. So I think in the United States, the bigger problem is the... is the distances putting things like camera requires a high bandwidth data transmission kind of you know some kind of like a communication link right so in comparison n5 there is no requirement for power communications you can just literally put an n5 sensor known in less than like you know 15 minutes for that reason gilpin county is optimistic about the possibilities of N5 sensors. The county, who hasn't put any money towards a solution yet, hopes to secure funds to invest in another 200 N5 sensors this summer. We're integrating a variety of other technology options to it. We've got a grant out that we're trying to get a drone to attach to this. So if one of the sensors does pick up whatever, whatever signature it picks up and it's 10 miles in the back country, we just launch a drone and fly it out to that. site and others could be used by utilities. We're partnering now with our local energy company here in the county with United Power to let them or to allow us to put these sensors on their power poles. Electrical power lines are a leading cause to wildfires which is why utilities are now taking a more active role in securing their assets and given the size of these utilities the question is how do you do this without you know putting out millions and millions sensors. That's M -Press CEO Andy Bennett. You might remember M -Press from our previous story involving the New York Power Authority, who uses M -Press software to detect abnormal behavior within its transformers. This is the same software that powers the analytics within Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. M -Press has now trained this algorithm to detect potential wildfires within a utility. It's a new solution made possible through a partnership with BIS BIS, for years, has been consulting with utilities to look at the behavior of their assets and to try and determine which assets were functioning correctly within utility, which need to be replaced. They've built models that really help utilities decide the economics of when they want to replace assets. What we've done is we've taken M -Press, a core set of IoT technology, and we've used that software. to connect to that same BIS model and to make it essentially dynamic. So what I mean by that is, rather than just running a computational model, now what we're doing is we're running that same model, we've rebuilt it inside of the algorithms that M-Press make, and we're connecting to real-time sensors. It collects information from the utility's existing sensors, and similarly to N5 and B2 Fire. detection software systems. It collects data from nearby weather stations and satellites. And so what that allows you to do is start to look at the behavior that's taking place outside. It could be a hot day, it could be a windy day, low humidity. It's looking at all the sensors that the utility has out there and it's starting to predict when the potential for an incident might occur. The solution is currently being used by a utility in the Pacific. Northwest, who prefers not to be named, but Bennett says it took just two months to get that prototype up and running. No word on the price of the solution, but Bennett says it's much less than deploying a system of cameras, for example. So clearly, a lot of moves in the IoT market when it comes to wildfire detection, and for good reason. Connectivity continues to challenge the market, specifically in the United States. Solar-powered sensors using LoRa show great promise. And the rise of satellite internet access could open up even more possibilities. We'll continue to dig in, so follow along on Current Insights.