Tech Challenge Spotlight: Aqua Alarm
For our spring Tech Challenge, we sought AI-native technologies that form the building blocks of a cognitive water ecosystem. Our program sponsors, Badger Meter, Watts Water Technologies and Xylem, chose Aqua Alarm of Norway to win the $10,000 prize for its predictive maintenance technology that helps utilities identify failures before they occur. Learn more about Aqua Alarm in this Q&A with its COO, Mikael Buchmann, and watch for our fall Tech Challenge to open soon!
Tell us about Aqua Alarm and why it is so innovative.
Aqua Alarm was spun out from years of university-lead R&D in Norway, with roots in the oil and gas industry. The energy sector, historically, tends to be a step ahead and look for ways to increase efficiency and reduce risk.
The research that spawned the company was part of a much larger, international research community that examined how low-cost and highly durable microbial water quality sensors could be useful for operational purposes. And the sensors that we have developed, as it turns out, are exactly that. Both in the lab and in the field, we have seen that we can use our hardware to not only get a solid understanding that something is happening when it happens, but also get an understanding of why it happens. And when you know why something happens, you can mitigate and increase efficiency. And when that exists digitally, you can of course share it, store it, improve it  and – since our sensors are so cheap – scale it.
In some business cases, we identified a need to gather more information about the water quality. This brought us to design a sampler, which can capture incidents identified by the sensor on a lab bottle to be further analyzed.
We believe we offer something genuinely new to the market that will help not only identify problems, but also build workflows across management, operations, compliance, finance and other parts of the company that aim to work closely together but have struggled to find the unifying interface to do so efficiently.
How is AI integral to the technology?
The water industry has shown great prowess by leaning into the acquisition of advanced data collection over many years and even decades. There are sensors at every point, and the industry’s digitalization strategy is second to none. Forward-thinking leaders understood long ago that data-driven management is the only way such complex infrastructure can be securely and efficiently managed.
The industry has an enormous amount of data points with rapidly changing data that long since exceeded human capability for pattern recognition or on-the-fly operational decision making. With our water quality sensor data as the lead indicator, AI allows us to tie all the other factors together that make our causal and predictive heuristics solid enough to present them directly to end users of our platform, Aqua Insights.
How does winning the Tech Challenge impact your company?
It no doubt has had an important impact. The Water Council represents a credible voice within the community. That, combined with the jury that represents some of the most respected companies in the sector, validates Aqua Alarm in a way paid marketing could never accomplish.
We understand that it takes courage and dedication for companies to commit to innovation in the water sector and that there are many promising solutions out there. Getting acceptance from such an important group for what we have been promoting for so long helps decision makers be a little bolder than they otherwise might have been and scope out a project with us to try it out.
Personally, for those of us working with this every day, it is also very motivating to hear competent actors outside our bubble acknowledging that we are investing money and years of hard work into an idea truly worth pursuing.