When the coronavirus showed the world a crisis, Brad Halsey saw an opportunity for innovation.
He is working with a team around the clock to rapidly prototype solutions to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
"When this emerged it was time for us to do what we do best," Halsey, a Navy veteran, told Connecting Vets.
He and his team created a robot that uses a special light to disinfect surfaces, a UV light grill that can disinfect small items, and custom made vacuum formed face masks.
His team includes engineers and PhDs but also people of other backgrounds, even an actor. From Halsey's point of view, having a diverse team is the best way to quickly arrive at creative solutions. The sterilization robot, for instance, was prototyped in days.
A taped off area of their maker space was used for testing purposes as the robot was guided to sterilize vertical, and some horizontal surfaces. They want to make other robots and give them to hospitals to use. They also want to build a sterilization grill, but one that has a conveyer belt like a metal detector at the airport that people can just run their personal items through to quickly sterilize them.
With COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, solutions are found but then new problems emerge, leading to more innovations. For instance, how do you know that a UV light is really sterilizing a surface? They are now looking at a light that changes colors to tell you that virus particles have been killed.
Halsey and his team are setting up a mechanism for their endeavors to be supported through donations to their non-profit called Athena.
While the coronavirus crisis is a frightening time for many, it can also be an exciting one for those trying to invent new solutions to help people combat the spread of the virus. "Once you start kicking ant hills other things start happening," Halsey said in reference to how solutions lead to other problems and in turn other solutions.
Halsey is also a veteran. With a chemistry degree from Vanderbilt in hand, he served as a Naval officer first in an EOD dive unit and then as a surface warfare officer.
Leaving the Navy shortly before 9/11, Halsey went to work for the Sanford Research Institute but he, "got really frustrated there talking about making time machines and death stars," he said jokingly, although his frustration was real. Halsey found that think tanks theorize about problems from a distance, acting as armchair problem solvers. "Meanwhile groups like Al Qaeda were being very innovative and clever," he explained.
Halsey wanted to solve problems where they occur. That was how he ended up getting sent to Iraq in 2008 as a lead engineer for the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force Laboratory. He was working for a company called Exponent that had a small group consulting overseas with the Army. Once he volunteered for the position they deployed him abroad within a month.
Today, he continues similar innovative work with Building Momentum. "We pride ourselves as being a company that puts ourselves in those places and doing rapid prototyping. We've been to disasters international and domestic," Halsey said.
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Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
