Distributed Detecting Via Mobile Phones

Here’s an interesting article about people wanting to put sensors sensors (biological, chemical, radiation etc) on mobile phones…”They are working to develop cheap wireless sensors that, once fitted inside cell phones, could sniff out anything from biological weapons to traffic patterns. While the sensors might not be a typical cell-phone add-on, those involved in the research claim the sheer number of mobile phones in use could make such a system a boon for worldwide data collection and problem solving.”
If you have data coming from cell phones, you have both very, very large scale (and) very fine granularity. So you can have very fine, detailed readings in a sensor area,” said R.J. Honicky, a computer science Ph.D. student working on the software components of the project.
Simple messages could be sent via SMS, or perhaps more cheaply via WAP. More interesting than a single application is the concept: the “distributed detecting” technique is a lot like the “distributed computing” technique that allows the use of many small, relatively weak computers to achieve a powerful result. In the same way a million home computers can search for intelligent extraterrestrial life or the particular folding of a protein, a million mobile phones can provide maps of concentrations of various substances in the atmosphere. Considering the ubiquity of mobile phones only a small percentage of users need to add the detectors, and although each phone will likely only detect one substance the large numbers should also allow for a variety of detectors to be installed. This could be cheaper than other methods of monitoring the environment. (via Textually.org)
Related stories:
User Generated Location Tips
Using Mobile Phones for Secure, Distributed Document Processing in the Developing World
Mobile P2P

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