BELLEVUE, Wash. - They say it's the small companies that come up with the break-through innovations, and then partner with bigger corporations to get those innovations onto the market.
Microsoft once partnered with IBM.
A small company that made tiny unmanned airplanes called Insitu partnered with Boeing to become a major player in the unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV business.
That's where Bellevue-based Emit Technologies is trying to get to. The company says its People Portal II body scanner could have found the explosives sewn into the underwear of the accused terrorist aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, had it been in use.
When I asked Emit's president Curt Lew if his product would have found the bomb, he didn't respond with words like "maybe" or "probably." His word is "absolutely."
"It wouldn't matter if it was clothing, or layered on or it could have been a special bomb vest or some kind of ankle wrap, we would have found any of those," said Lew.
The People Portal is the invention of bio-medical engineer Tex Yukl, who operates the company's laboratory in Eastern Washington, in the town of Clarkston on the Idaho state line.
When I visited the lab in 2007, Yukl demonstrated the prototype and showed me testing of the People Portal II as it was detecting simulated explosives provided by the FAA and even powdered sugar that Yukl says has a similar electronic signature as cocaine.
Emit's technology uses tiny bursts of microwave energy to locate and flag for a security officer, anything that isn't flesh and bone.
"Plastics, ceramics, paper, drugs, liquids," all show up, said Yukl. "If they aren't physiological, it will alarm."
The Transporation Security Administration so far has only deployed other types of body scanners to 19 U.S. airports, and a TSA spokesman told me earlier this week that only six of those airports use the scanners as a primary means of scanning. Most use them only when screeners want to do additional checks on an individual. The machines remain controversial on privacy grounds, because critics claim the machines produce pictures that show what people look like naked.
TSA has taken safeguards for those scans to remain anonymous and are not saved, but it's in this arena where Emit Technologies thinks it has another advantage. The People Portal only shows a generic wire frame figure of a person and a red spot where it locates something, a spot where a human screener should take a closer look.
Other technologies that puff air at passengers and then sniff for bomb odors appear to have fallen out of favor with the TSA as being too unreliable.
Now Emit has come up with another security device - one that scans bottles. The technology also uses the microwaves to determine if a bottle is full of water, coffee, juice, soda or another drinkable liquid and is therefore safe to bring through a checkpoint, or if the bottle instead contains a chemical or liquid that could be used in a bomb. If the machine flashes green lights, the bottle is good to go; if the lights are red, the bottle can be confiscated and an investigation begun.
Are the microwaves safe? Emit Technologies says they are - being about one millionth as strong as those coming from a microwave oven.
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