CyberPow: Cyber Sensing for Power Outage Detection
Established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards is the only S&T (science and technology) awards competition that recognizes new commercial products, technologies, and materials for their technological significance that are available for sale or license. The R&D 100 Awards, celebrating the program's 60th Anniversary this year, has long been a benchmark of excellence for industry sectors as diverse as telecommunications, high-energy physics, software, manufacturing, and biotechnology. This 2022 R&D 100 winner is listed below, along with its respective category.
Category: Software/Services
Developers: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
United States
Product Description:MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s CyberPow: Cyber Sensing for Power Outage Detection uses pervasive, Internet-connected devices as an alternative sensing network to rapidly estimate and map the extent and location of power outages across geographic boundaries without needing to rely on electric utilities to produce near real-time situational awareness, enabling more timely and effective post-disaster decision making and resource prioritization. It provides a single, easily understood source of power status data in one consistent format. The method, which is complementary to existing solutions and addresses many of their shortcomings, is low cost and easily scalable with cloud computing services. CyberPow has provided real-time results upon request to government responders, such as FEMA and the Massachusetts Air National Guard, during multiple large-scale events to aid response efforts and resource prioritization, such as informing daily search-and-rescue plans. Additionally, CyberPow has the potential to provide multiple market segments and use cases with previously unavailable access to power status data, which can be correlated with other data to enable new insights.
Developers: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
United States
Product Description:MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s CyberPow: Cyber Sensing for Power Outage Detection uses pervasive, Internet-connected devices as an alternative sensing network to rapidly estimate and map the extent and location of power outages across geographic boundaries without needing to rely on electric utilities to produce near real-time situational awareness, enabling more timely and effective post-disaster decision making and resource prioritization. It provides a single, easily understood source of power status data in one consistent format. The method, which is complementary to existing solutions and addresses many of their shortcomings, is low cost and easily scalable with cloud computing services. CyberPow has provided real-time results upon request to government responders, such as FEMA and the Massachusetts Air National Guard, during multiple large-scale events to aid response efforts and resource prioritization, such as informing daily search-and-rescue plans. Additionally, CyberPow has the potential to provide multiple market segments and use cases with previously unavailable access to power status data, which can be correlated with other data to enable new insights.

CyberPow Figure 1