Will radiation levels in the future be crowd-sourced? Russian inventor and Intersoft Eurasia CEO Vladimir Yelin seems to think so. He has developed a cheap smart-phone add-on that can be either retrofitted or directly incorporated into your phone. The software that comes with the DO-RA radiation meter can report radiation levels automatically to a central database, it can be programmed to take periodic readings and to alert the phone’s owner when dangerous levels of radiation are detected.
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Moscow start-up turns smart phones into multi-purpose radiation detectors
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Android and Windows, and more
The semiconductor detector based dosimeter-radiometer is powered from its ‘parent’ phone’s battery. For the built-in option, there’s a special software package that controls the device’s interaction with the phone.
The clip-on version is also software enabled and attaches to the phone’s USB port. Its detector communicates with the base device via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or any other system that the phone and local telecoms support. With the kind of universal connectivity the Do-Ra can be linked up to a laptop computer as well, according to the developers.
The software Intersoft Eurasia has developed allows the Do-Ra to work with iOS and Android-based devices and applications for MacOS, RIM’s BlackBerry, Windows and Linux are coming within a month or so, the company says.
Next gen already in the works
According to Intersoft Eurasia, the next generation of its product will be based on graphene—an allotrope of carbon with a one-atom-thick sheet structure and unique properties that won researchers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov their 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Mr. Yelin, the lead innovator and designer behind the Do-Ra project, reportedly holds a patent for a graphene-based prototype as well.
For now, availability is limited. Intersoft’s website only accepts pre-orders.