Taiwan’s III Uses Edge AI and Clams for Two-Minute Water Alerts

Conventional water-quality monitoring often depends on multiple sensors and laboratory sampling, adding hardware and maintenance costs while potentially delaying detection of sudden contamination. Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry, or III, is developing a lower-cost biological warning system that uses golden clams, which collectively close their shells when exposed to toxic substances. Edge-AI image recognition tracks that behavior, while digital-twin technology models conditions and supports real-time analysis.

The system can identify abnormal shell-closing patterns and flag potential acute toxic contamination in as little as two minutes, according to III’s AI Research Institute. The approach is designed to sharply reduce hardware deployment costs compared with conventional monitoring equipment. It has been installed at a water-treatment plant in New Taipei City for field testing and validation, with III planning to extend the technology to aquaculture facilities and other water-resource management sites.