[ RadSafe ] Purdue working on cell phones with radiation detection

[Susan Gawarecki]

I'm sure HPs everywhere will be *overjoyed* when every person has their 
own personal radiation detector.  And local police departments will be 
especially happy.

The system proposed below may well be automated.  No truckload of 
bananas will be safe.  Nor would any patient who had recently undergone 
a medical procedure involving a radioactive isotope.

Susan Gawarecki

Purdue working on cell phones with radiation detection
http://nationalcongress.org/showarticle.php?articleID=6971

JC | 02.12.2008 | 12:17:4449 |
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.