New Tech Seattle Event:  Who is ThruWave? An introduction to millimeter wave imaging from ThruWave Co-Founder Claire Watts.

ThruWave technology was featured at a New Tech Seattle event where our Co-Founder, Claire Watts presented about ThruWave technology and examples of use for industry.  Content below is based on the video transcript.

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My name is Claire Watts. I am the co-founder of ThruWave along with Professor Matt Reynolds here at and Andreas Pedross-Engel.

ThruWave makes the invisible, visible with human safe millimeter waves. Many people are probably most familiar with millimeter waves from airport security screening. You go in the tunnel, stand still and put up your hands, and you're automatically screened for contraband material. ThruWave is taking that technology from the security and defense space, and adapting it for business purposes.

What does ThruWave do?

 ThruWave makes 3D millimeter wave images. I'm showing some example images here from the packaged goods space. On the left here, we have a sealed cardboard box, what your traditional camera sees. In the center, I show some items that we've hidden inside that sealed box. And on the right, we have a ThruWave produced 3D millimeter wave image. So you can see not only do we see right through the cardboard, but we're actually able to visualize these objects in three dimensions.

Another way we can visualize this 3D data set is to look at 2D depth slices, very similar to an MRI or a CT scan; what I'm showing on the second row there. So you can see as we step through these depth slices or peel back the layers, we can kind of see how each one of these objects is illuminated individually.

How does the ThruWave system work?

You saw on the previous images that we not only get 3D information, but we can also see through opaque materials like cardboard. ThruWave is able to do this with millimeter wave imaging technology.

So here I show one of our devices next to a conveyor belt system, and we are imaging a sealed package as it goes by. ThruWave's imaging apparatus emits millimeter waves, and then collects the reflected signal. Now, because millimeter waves can penetrate opaque packaging material, we are actually illuminating objects inside the box that are hidden from view. In the end, we're kind of like an x-ray vision system, but because millimeter waves are harmless to humans, we're able to do this without the health hazards.

In short, what we do is we make 3D images of items inside sealed packages that traditional camera systems can't see.

An exciting and impactful technology

ThruWave's technology is exciting and impactful because we reduce manual labor and error rate in fulfillment, logistics and manufacturing operations. We essentially hit on a big pain point of one of the largest growing industries in the world. Fulfillment and e-commerce are now $1 trillion per year business. And so thus companies like UPS and FedEx are shipping up to 20 million packages a day, and where there are packages, there are errors. So, what ThruWave enables these companies to do is look inside these packages and automatically audit them for errors. Basically, we can reduce the amount of manual labor from the quality control pipeline, thus saving these companies potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that they would normally spend in package error rate reduction.

So let's take a look at how ThruWave's system would operate in for example, a fulfillment center. Again, I've placed our device next to a conveyor belt system, so we're looking at packages before they leave the center. So we get a 3D image of a package. And then we then send that data to specialized image processing software, where it can flag the package for errors.

I show an example here in the lower right where we have a millimeter wave image of two folded t-shirts. The one on the left is contaminant free, however, the one on the right has two broken metallic needles that have been identified and flagged as errors. So this package will automatically be flagged, diverted, and someone can deal with the issue. Essentially, we've removed the manual cost of opening a box from the quality control pipeline.

The ThruWave Solution

So the ThruWave solution involves more than just our imaging hardware, we have this millimeter wave sensor modules, cloud image, analytics, and specialized imaging algorithms. We create actionable items that can be read by MES and WMS systems, and optimize fulfillment centers and warehouses.

So with that, I ask you the New Tech Northwest community, if you work in the fulfillment space, if you work in operations, or if you just have a cool use case that you think ThruWave can solve, please contact us. We'd love to hear from you.