Today, we live in a highly polluted environment, so it’s good for us to stay highly aware of how polluted our environment is, and how to tackle or avoid it in order to stay healthy. Shannon Spanhake and colleagues at the University of California San Diego and the Calit2 are developing a gadget, the Squirrel, which is a bluetooth-enabled personal pollution monitor that its size is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand or clasped to a belt or purse.
Squirrel is bluetooth-enabled, which means it can send the collected data wirelessly to a database, such as a database on your smartphone or other portable devices. From that on, we can judge the level of the pollution and then find ways to tackle it at the level of individual, the region and even up to the country. To analyze the pollution level, a software program called Acorn needs to be installed on your cellphone or other portable devices. The software will be able to alert you about the pollution level in a pretty straightforward way, i.e through the screensaver on the cell phone’s display. Other than this, the software also makes the your cellphone to transmit the environmental data periodically to a central repository on the Internet, which is operated by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the organization that is funding this project. The current prototype measures only carbon monoxide and ozone, but eventually the device will be able to deal with nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide in the air, as well as temperature, biometric pressure and humidity!
via [Medgadget]
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