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Image Insight: Low-Cost Radioactivity Awareness and Protection

Eric Rubenstein, President

Exposure to ionizing radiation is a societal hazard that continues to rise as the world strides into the so-called Anthropocene era. Today, there are thousands of radioactive sources that can be potentially lethal, whether through accident, theft, or the malicious intent of a terrorist. The need for situational awareness of radiation exposure has become imperative at individual, community, state, and defense levels. Protection from radiation, personal safety, and prevention of exposure, all require proactive detection and preparedness. Connecticut-based Image Insight is one among those who walk the walk with its proven and effective range of ionizing radiation detection offerings based on the GammaPix™ technology, a revolutionary radiation detection system that enables low-cost radioactivity awareness and protection.

The company’s offerings intuitively transform common electronic devices such as surveillance cameras, laptops, tablets and smartphones into real-time radioactivity detectors. Unknown to many, these devices house CMOS and CCD sensors that are influenced by radioactive signals. The GammaPix software recognizes, classifies, characterizes, and quantifies the radiation, and then produces reports that are presented as either a routine measurement or as an alarm in the event of excessive radiation. The information can then be relayed through any connected network to ultimately appear on relevant dashboards of the concerned authorities or across the community, depending on the use case. “GammaPix substantially upgrades any city’s existing radiation detection and civil defense infrastructure with minimal cost and utmost ease of installation while ensuring all round-availability and cyber-security,” says Eric Rubenstein, President of Image Insight and the inventor of GammaPix.

Having developed the core proprietary technology through private and government-funded R&D, Image Insight has built an ecosystem of solutions around it to enable citizens, as well as government and defense agencies, to build multi-pronged radiation protection networks, strategies, and training programs.

For example, GammaPix Pro™and GammaPix Video™ are respectively the smartphone app and surveillance camera compatible variants of GammaPix that can detect radiation exposure levels in cities, on airplanes, or to detect the theft of radioactive materials from hospitals or industrial radiography sites. In addition, Image Insight provides GammaPix Connect™ integration services, which provides a low-cost, high-availability, highly-secure distributed detector management and networking system that can effectively pull in data from a wide range of devices and fuse the information from them to the dashboards of the appropriate authority. Their detector software framework, called Image Insight Internet of Things (I3oT™), imparts a holistic view of the radioactivity levels, or other types of threat or informational data, across a locality or establishment. I3oT eases the integration of detectors of almost any kind, including those for the full range of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) weapon threats. Image Insight also offers its own GammaPix Command Center™, which serves as the central point to interact with the GammaPix suite of software. Like authority dashboards, the GammaPix Command Center compiles, fuses, and visualizes data in real-time, and intuitively projects them as reports or alarms to the analyst.

When it comes to radioactive emergency training, Image Insight offers the novel GammaPix Training Simulator™ product, which bring trainees closest to experiencing real-world scenarios. The company’s augmented reality training suite has an intuitive interface that creates realistic-sized virtual radiation sources in any geographical area for first responders and military personnel to use in adequately preparing themselves for the most intricate aspects of rescue or containment operations. GammaPix has successfully aced stringent tests by national laboratories in the U.S. and abroad and is designated as a Qualified Anti-Terrorism Technology (QATT) under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s SAFETY Act.

Having multiple clients from different countries including police, large U.S. Department of Defense installation, and private sports facility customers, Image Insight is holding discussions with major smart cities vendors to implement GammaPix as a value-add for their security infrastructure. “We are also working with partner sensor companies to bring their cutting-edge technologies into the fold by enabling seamless integration and secure communications,” concludes Rubenstein.