Instrument may enable mail-in testing to detect heavy metals in water - our work of six years!

Our work that recently won the Atal New India Challenge (ANIC) under the category, Providing Potable Water to Water Quality Affected Areas, is featured on MIT main page in a lucid article by Jennifer Chu of MIT News. A shout out to two champions, Emily Hanhauser (MIT) who created a dry sampling "tea bag" technology for absorbing, dry preserving, and easily transporting metal-based contaminants like arsenic, cadmium, chromium etc. to labs for further testing, and to Sri Harsha (Kritsnam, IITK) for building a device around it for making the sampled water potable. 

Link to MIT Article about this work.

This is a true inter-disciplinary effort by the supporting team comprising Prof. Rohit Karnik of MIT (on pollutant transport mechanisms), Dr. Michael Bono formerly MIT-now BU (analytical chemistry), Prof. Indra Sen of IITK (environmental pollution remediation), Prof. John Hart of MIT (advanced manufacturing), and Chintan Vaishnav of MIT (socio-technical system architecture). Earlier, Charlene Ren studied the institutional setup for water quality management that forms the context of this work. 

For those seeking to do such work; in my mind, the genesis of this work is in the coming together of two epiphanies. In Chintan Vaishnav's early conversations with Prof. Anil Gupta and Dr. Uday Balkrishnan (who was then the post master general of Kerala and subsequently India) that we must find a way to leverage the unique capacity of the ubiquitous postal network that can transporting atoms (not just bits) to and from every village of India. And, in Rohit Karnik and Emily Hanhauser observing that the concept of dry blood spotting, which has revolutionized health care, may serve as an inspiration for dry sampling and preservation of water contaminants. 

Of course, much work remains, all over the world including right here in the United States, but now we have decidedly taken a step in the direction of helping rural mothers, children and others to go beyond simple boiling of water, which can remove biological contaminants but cannot remove the metal-based contaminants that are deadly in a very silent way. 

Come, work with us...

Chintan Vaishnav, MIT