ARETE ASSOCIATES — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: A17A-T020

Description

Historically, the monitoring and detection of biological threats has been carried out via the deployment of high sensitivity / high complexity monitoring nodes to insure high probability of detection and low false alarm rate. Unfortunately, this detection strategy has inherent limits with respect to coverage and response due to its high deployment/support costs, mandating a new approach to environmental monitoring for bio-aerosol threats. Recent advances in sensors, Internet of Things, and communications have created an opportunity to exploit lower fidelity information but on a much larger scale with respect to node counts and node modalities. The challenge is to harness this higher count / lower fidelity data and convert it into actionable information while maintaining acceptable false alarm rates and response times.Aret Associates and its team member RTI propose an analytical methodology called UBAN, A Ubiquitous Biological Assessment Network.UBAN is a sensor agnostic, highly scalable, self-healing approach to the fusion and conditioning of large and changing environmental data inputs. UBAN is a tiered approach applying simulation, sensor modeling, and field testing to provide performance improvements related to LoD, TTD and FAR.