UCSD researchers hope to track airborne toxins with sensor-equipped cellphones
By Donald Melanson 
posted May 15th 2010 7:44AM
posted May 15th 2010 7:44AM
If researchers the world over have their way, cellphones will one day be used to detect and track everything from nuclear radiation to pollution to cancer, and it looks like you can now add one more to the group -- some researchers from the University of California, San Diego have developed a tiny sensor that could eventually let cellphones track airborne toxins in real time. To do that, the researchers have proposed a rather novel system that would consist of a tiny silicon sensor that changes color when it interacts with various chemicals, and a equally tiny camera with a macro lens that would actually capture an image of the sensor and display it on the phone's screen. As you might have guessed, however, while the researchers are now showing off the sensor itself, they still have a ways to go on the cellphone part of the equation -- although they have apparently started work on a prototype.
Wow talk about Big Brother!
@zeroinfinity2
Agree, especially once you start to think about the wider implications, while it a nice idea...
a) it is useless if the mobile phone is not GPS equipped
a1) sending off your GPS location regularly is pratically surveillance and who knows who gains access to that data...
a2) being in a cellphone I highly doubt this would be 100% anonymous - especially as there would possibly be allowances for firmware updates - and once you have those you can control what is sent...
b) it requires an unlimited data plan - or will they pay people's phone bills?
If that were to become standard I'd either use an old phone or not use one at all... considering I don't use my mobile a lot and I am on pay as you got that wouldn't be a problem for me.
@DetlevCM I'm sure a phone manufacturer could send your GPS location to anyone if they wanted, with or without this detector.
Also, why does it need unlimited data? I doubt it'd alert anyone unless something serious was detected, and even then, that's up to the phone manufacturer.
@Glitch
I suppose yes - you are right about GPS - but in my case my phone doesn't have any :)
And about sending information - well, it would make the most sense if you monitor constantly, because that would be the most valuable information - how does pollution change.
But even assume it wants to send out information once - I wouldn't want to pay for it - period.
@zeroinfinity2 If it's that small why don't they pay to get sensor boxes installed in street lamps? Not necessarily at the top but perhaps put a little box a third of the way up the pole.
It'd be a LOT of data to cover a city, but you could monitor pollutants, temperature, toxins - just about anything across an entire city. It would be more reliable than people ("always" on) and there would be no worrying about privacy.
@DetlevCM depending on the accuracy one wants, celltower and wifi is also good for determining location. It is widely used to assist GPS.
I highly agree about the big brother aspect. This should be something that cannot be remote controlled and is optional. Default off.
@TechCF
True - but:
That can only be achieved from the network side as you know where your towers are, the cellphone doesn't know that.
I'm not even sure if it knows which cells its in...
Or am I missing something?
The question is, how paranoid do you need to be to actually want this in your phone?
@Whiternoise
Agreed. These kinds of sensors really have no place in cell phones. Telephone poles and tops of buildings are good, constitutionally neutral place to put things like this.
Excellent....one step closer to a tricorder.
@N3XuSeXe They've actually had a 'real' tricorder, manufactured by the now defunct company "Vital Technologies Corporation". They made about 1500 of them in 1996 - I'll let you read about them on the Wiki article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder
Spidey sense starting to tingle... Wonder if the sensor changes color when you pass gas?
Nothing like being told you're about to die. I have a gesture to patent in relation to this...
Lol @ the comments at Physorg. They're more concerned about the chance of it costing them a phone call than the benefit of alerting people of possible dangers. Also, last I checked, emergency calls were free.
I think this is interesting. But I do wonder what would happen if it did detect something nasty.
@Glitch I was thinking the same thing. What if someone that works at a nuclear plant leaves the phone somewhere it's exposed to direct radiation. Will it just log the event, call the police, or even homeland security?
Did they just rub the tip of an LED in feces?
So everything I fart the UCSD will know?
@Jaylittles531
would you really want your location sent off because your phone detected high concentrations of cannabis smoke?
I was just going to post a rhetorical question about how long it would take privacy extremists to balk at the idea - but I see it was post 1.
If the tech becomes feasible then the mass proliferation and networked nature of cell phones makes them ideal for gathering environmental information.
I'll all for privacy - but this is hardly to due with anything truly private and the benefits could be large.
One mustn't forget to stir in a dollop of societal responsibility to their fair share of rights.
@savagemike
I wouldn't consider myself a privacy extremist, but thinking that there is a probe in my phone sending out various data and images is borderline disturbing. It already sucks that the GPS does this already.
If you think that this is "social responsibility", then you must also think that a national blood type registry must be a good idea, or having your television automatically take pictures of whoever is watching is a comforting thought.
Imagine the census data! Imagine the targeted ads!
Imagine that.
@zeroinfinity2
If you see a logical correlation between databases which contain information about you specifically or tv sets which photograph who is viewing particular material and a proposed method of gathering air quality information which happens to use photographic rendering of a sensor to collect data - then, yes, I would recommend you reconsider whether you are an extremist.
The common point of photos is a red herring as large as I have ever seen.
Nowhere, in any of this pie-in-the-sky ambition is anything mentioned about cataloging anything of a personal nature what-so-ever.
The human presence in this scheme is nothing more than a random carrier of technology.
It hasn't even mentioned cataloging general features about you like age or sex - no less any actual personal information.
Probably won't cost much more to add weed, crack, or crank smoke recognition to the sensors.
Mmmm rl tricorder...
Go Tritons!
@crow610
Woohoo! SunGod last night was awesome.
Sign me up! I'd love to have this information to the world -- and to the naysayers it would have to be either an opt-in account-handled service, or opt-in anonymous service.
I'd do it for free, but it'd be sweet if researchers would subsidize the phone a little bit this way.
The government isn't wasting my battery.
holy cow, that's my school!
I'm a Ph.D. student in the lab working on this at UCSD. My work is principally on other chemical sensor projects that also take advantage of porous silicon, but if you're interested in checking out some videos of a few prototypes of non-imaging sensors I've made along the way check out: http://www.youtube.com/chemicalsensors#p/u/0/ut00Ifg6rrk
-Brian