Ferndale tech company to donate 10 firearm detection devices to schools

FERNDALE — A Ferndale-based tech company will be giving away 10 firearm detection devices to school districts.

The company, Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions Inc., and its subsidiary, Robotic Assistance Devices, made the announcement during a demonstration of the device July 18 at its Ferndale manufacturing facility, the Rex.

The device that Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions and Robotic Assistance Devices is giving away is called ROSA — Responsive Observation Security Agent. The ROSA, AITX/RAD founder and CEO Steve Reinharz said, could be installed over school entries and in parking lots in 30 minutes or less and can detect, alert and lock down schools within five to 10 seconds of a firearm being detected in the area. He also said that the ROSA is self-contained.

“After you activate the firearm detection analytic, if you are presented with a short gun or a long gun, depending on the angle and the distance — all of that depends on, you know, a variety of circumstances — you can have this alarm immediately activated, ‘immediately’ being up to 10 seconds,” he said.

“As part of that activation sequence, you’re gonna get audible alerts, visible alerts — you’re gonna get text messages to law enforcement, school administration, a school resource officer, all of that happens automatically,” he continued. “And if the school is equipped with locks on their doors, then we connect to that and we send a lockdown signal to that system, which then locks it down.”

Reinharz said the artificial intelligence system used inside the devices has been trained to recognize a firearm.

“We’ll train it on 1,000 images, and then we’ll run 10,000 through it automatically,” he said. “After that, it’ll have a good idea of what a weapon might look like this way, that way, up, down, behind my back, holding all these other directions, and then it activates based on that. What we do with  the analytic is we’ll say, ‘What’s the confidence level that we need to be able to register in order to activate the alarm?’ So generally, we have it set on 60% confidence, which might allow a few false alarms to be activated, part of it, but we want to make sure that we capture the real event when it happens.”

The donation from the company is part of what it’s calling Bailey’s Gift, which is named after Bailey Holt, a 15-year-old girl who died in a Kentucky high school shooting in 2018.

Holt’s mother, Secret, has become an advocate for the technology and said the program caught her attention after Reinharz and his team reached out to her. She said the technology caught her attention due to how it detects the firearms outside the schools and prevents people from bringing them in.

“My main goal going forward is to ensure children’s safety, and I believe that this technology that Steve’s introduced, it can prevent so much tragedy and chaos for children,” she said.

“I think it’s amazing. If we had this technology 4 1/2 years ago, Bailey may still be here today. And all of the students from Uvalde would be here today, too,” Holt said.

As for how the company will determine which schools will receive the 10 $7,000 ROSA devices that will be donated, Reinharz stated that the company will be looking at districts in metro Detroit, as well as other areas around the country.

“We’re basically going to say, ‘Hey, who’s underserved and who’s at highest risk and what’s more nationally dispersed,’” he said.

A school that is selected to receive a ROSA would get the device by the beginning of the upcoming school year this fall.

“We’re trying to use Bailey’s Gift and more to get the word out to show that it’s not a big project to provide some level of action,” Reinharz continued. “We should have these solutions in these schools. If I’m walking up with a firearm, people should know about it, and schools should lock down and we should get away from the political discourse of red and blue and guns and no guns. That’s going to be solved or not solved separately. Right now, we can do something, which is lock down the schools.”

Local school districts interested in learning more about the donation can visit www.aitx.ai for more information.