Cell Phones To "Smell" Chemical Threats

[mellowsong]

DHS wants to make your cell phone a 'smell' phone

App under development would enable phones to warn of chemical leaks or
attacks

The Homeland Security Department wants to equip your cell phone with a
sensor that can detect the presence of deadly chemicals.

DHS' Science and Technology Directorate is developing an application for
cell phones called Cell-All. When it senses a chemical threat, the Cell-All
cell phone app will send an alert in one of two ways. If the threat is
something like a small chlorine gas leak, the app will send a direct warning
to the user via text message, vibration, noise or phone call. If it's a
larger-scale catastrophe, such as a sarin gas attack, Cell-All will notify
an emergency operations center of the event, with time, location and
chemical information.

Now, if you noticed a strong chemical smell on the subway, you could call
9-1-1. The idea behind the Cell-All initiative is that you don't have to
call anybody; the phone determines the nature of the threat and makes the
call automatically. Also, if a number of people have Cell-All on their cell
phones when a toxic substance is released into a crowd, the emergency
operations center would receive multiple alerts about the same event. This
crowd-sourcing feature would decrease the number of false positives, DHS
says.

This is all still in the prototype phase. DHS is funding the next step in
the R&D process, a proof of principle. The department is working with four
cell phone manufacturers: Qualcomm, LG, Apple and Samsung. Cell-All program
manager Stephen Dennis says he hopes to have 40 prototypes in a year or so.
The first one will sniff out carbon monoxide and fire.

One of the elements of the prototype is an artificial nose, developed by a
company called Rhevision. It's a piece of porous silicon that changes color
in the presence of certain molecules.

I can think of plenty of times I wished I had an artificial nose on a
crowded subway. Clearly, there will be advantages to having this objective
measure of toxicity in crowds. On a few occasions I've suspected toxic fumes
on a crowded subway that turned out to be either somebody's leftover
Szechuan chicken or someone who forgot their Irish Spring that morning.
Fortunately, Cell-All's artificial nose will, in theory at least, be able to
distinguish the odious but harmless from real toxic fumes.

http://fcw.com/articles/2010/03/12/c...xic-fumes.aspx

[Islander]

I'm speechless.

[MissHealthy]

Same here.. I am speechless too
This is really going to help us in many ways. Thanks to the technology

[Aaltrude]

Welcome to the forum MissHealthy.

[MissHealthy]

Thanks Aaltrude!

[DizzyIzzy]

Wow, that actually sounds reasonable. I'm always paranoid of gas leaks, having worked at the fire service for a couple of years and having seen the effects of things like carbon monoxide, which you can't smell and can't see and can't taste but which will kill you pretty quick. Not a bad idea having a portable gas sensor.

I'm a bit wary of the whole automatic notifying of authorities, but if it's for the really serious gases then that's probably actually a good idea - specially given how quick-acting some of them are and may not leave time for you to call them yourself before you pass out.