PositiveID Corporation (fka PSID)

[rwa3848]

Final Exams or will MBand be tested at sea?

http://www.cbrneportal.com/interview-with-dr-peter-emanuel-the-joint-united-states-forces-korea-portal-and-integrated-threat-recognition/

I see with the BICS and BSP you are already in a very advanced stage. How far are you with the third leg, the assessment of the environmental detectors (AED)?

Well, if you asked me that question at the beginning of the summer I would have had a different answer, but now we’re in full swing with AED. So the idea with AED is that we’re looking to replace our older legacy systems: they’re expensive, they have a high training burden. So we believe our goal is to increase the performance of the systems, lower the training burden and lower the total life cycle costs of the systems. However, we’re not looking to select “one ring to rule them all”. We may end up selecting different systems for different needs, but this is the largest side-by-side assessment we’ve ever done.

Ten systems have been selected, while some of them have been drawn from the DHS efforts. First we bought four of every system. Two systems went over to Osan Air Base and they were turned on at the beginning of September at an airfield and they were run up until about last week. We didn’t attack them or anything, but we wanted to see whether they broke, how they did in the rain, in the sun.

Meanwhile, two more systems were flown to the two hundred foot long Ambient Breeze Tunnel and they were assessed by challenging them with 152 aerosol challenges of four different agents: anthrax, plague, bacillia and botoxin, and that assessment finished Friday. Those systems departed afterwards for the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and they are set to arrive tomorrow morning, undergoing a maritime excursion in an environment that simulates a naval vessel. This test will run through February 4, if we keep on schedule.

From there, we can begin to make decisions on how we proceed into the final exams, which we call the Operational Demonstration. The Operational Demonstration is overseen by the Army Testing and Evaluation Center. They work with the Operational Test Command, and they perform what they call a joint military utility assessment – a fancy phrase for our final exams. And those systems that pass the final exam then move forward and potentially serve the purpose of achieving a residual capability that will remain with USFK. Obviously everything that fails to demonstrate military utility is removed from theatre, because we only want to put the best of the best out there.

So to conclude, AED is still in motion right now, I’m actually set to get a snapshot of how that data looked after the holidays and then I should get the maritime excursion data sometime around Valentine’s Day.