UCSD's Squirrel puts pollution monitoring on your mobile
Giving an animal a phone to tote around and monitor pollution is one thing, but hooking up a critter to your cellphone sans wires sounds like a much more viable solution to keeping track of filthy surroundings. UC San Diego's Squirrel -- which sounds an awful lot like a project UC Berkeley was working on -- is a Bluetooth-enabled, palm-sized sensor that currently measures carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually will be able to "sample nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity." After sampling, the device then utilizes a software application dubbed Acorn to allow the user to "see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cellphone's display." Furthermore, the program can periodically upload the captured data to a public database operated by the "California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is funding Squirrel's development." Of course, cleaning up the mess that these monitors will inevitably find is an entirely different matter.[Via MedGadget]
Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matt Hadder @ May 7th 2007 10:05PM
This is deceptively very cool.
Aging baby boomers, asthmatics and the like would benefit from knowing how bad the air is around them at any given moment, especially if it gave warnings if the air quality became much worse.
Might help remind people to not idle their parked cars, or burn tires in the front yard etc etc.
Like most people I breath more than I take pictures, so I'd take this over a camera in a cell phone any day.
lakiolen @ May 8th 2007 12:30AM
I don't know about that Berkeley one from two years ago, but there is this
lakiolen @ May 8th 2007 12:32AM
This being: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~honicky/nsmarts/
stupid hrefs...
Ryan @ May 8th 2007 10:04AM
Wow, I went to UCSD and saw this at an engeneering fair, they had a nokia internet tablet hooked up to it also. Its just a python program, but it looks nice with some graphs. ^_^ Make it smaller and in a better form factor and people might do it.
saraa @ Jul 23rd 2007 10:41AM
There is a neat research carried by researchers in Cambridge University.
http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/mobiledata/
They use mobile phone, wireless pollution sensors/Asthma sensor to monitor pollution and link it to Ashtma.
Also they have a mobile social network to educate local communities about their environment.