New truck-safety technology developed in Edmonton, Alberta and credited with
averting a serious accident in West Virginia recently is getting a lot of attention in
the U.S.

It’s called Thermal Eye Technologies and it’s a system that reads heat signatures on trucks. A video camera identifies malfunctioning brakes as dark images while operational brakes show up as light images, sort of like the kind of infrared camera that’s used on police helicopters.

Thermal Eye said an operator hauling steel on a busy six-lane highway just west of
Charleston used the system to spot a rare defect in the truck’s running gear just
moments before it broke.

“No sooner had the driver parked his rig and started to walk towards the inspection office than the passenger side steering-axle wheel blew,” said Heath.

“It turned out that the bearings had overheated and the wheel was about to fall off.

“There is no doubt that the technology averted a major incident,” Heath says.

Thermal Eye Technologies was developed to detect brake failure specifically on
transport trucks. But it can also do cargo profiling, detect false compartments, and promises to detect radiation, thereby identifying improperly stored materials or even radiological dispersal devices, known as ‘dirty bombs’.

For that reason it’s caught the attention of U.S. Homeland Security, which is
talking to the company about using it in various capacities. Currently, 19 of the infrared inspection systems are in use by transportation enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Closer to home, Alberta Transportation has been renting a mobile Thermal Eye
unit as part of a pilot project 50% funded by the federal government.