under construction Home About Registration Accommodations Contact Congress Partners Awards Delegates Pilot Communities Education Credits Community Partners

 

Purdue working on cell phones with radiation detection

| 02.12.2008 | 12:17:447224 |
February 12 '08: Purdue University and the state of Indiana have partnered to develop a radiation detection technology which could be put into regular cell phones. In a press release, the university said that the technology would "use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological 'dirty bombs' and nuclear weapons."
To help with the project, AT&T donated the cellular data air time for the project. The system was developed by Andrew Longman, a consulting instrumentation scientist.

Longman said, "a system like this would make it very difficult to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb" if a cellphone network was capable of detecting and pinpointing radiation. "The more people are walking around with cellphones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

The research for the project was given by the Indiana Department of Transportation's Joint Transportation Research Program and the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University.

Ephraim Fischbach, physics professor at the university said, "cellphones today also function as Internet computers that can report their locations and data to their towers in real time. ... So this system would use the same process to send an extra signal to a home station. The software can uncover information from this data and evaluate the levels of radiation."

To make the cellphones radiation-detective, small microchips, which are relatively inexpensive, would be installed on the phones. During a test last November, the phones were able to detect radiation from a distance of 15 feet.