After a crisis, how can we tell if water is safe to drink? Current
tests are slow and complex, and the delay can be deadly, as in the cholera
outbreak after Haiti's
earthquake in 2010. TED Fellow
Sonaar Luthra previews his design for a simple
tool that quickly tests water for safety -- the Water Canary. He is the creator of Water Canary, a water-testing
device that collects real-time water-quality data from the field.
He was a writer and educator when he enrolled in NYU's famed Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) -- a breeding ground for cross-disciplinary thinking. He tells the TED Blog what happened next:
"I wanted to come up with some way of becoming what I was calling an 'urban planner for the global village.' And ... I fell in love with circuitry and with making tangible objects that had real functionality. Next thing I knew, I found myself in a class called Design for UNICEF, taught by Clay Shirky in association with UNICEF’s Innovations Lab.