Turning People into Tools for the War on Terror
April 21 2008 | 0 comment(s)
The ubiquity and advanced capabilities of today's mobile phones have led a few American researchers to the idea of utilizing people and their gadgets as automated bomb sniffers. Professors from Purdue University invented a system that would utilize smart mobile phones to detect and track radiological bombs and nuclear weapons according to the Purdue News Service. This novel application could turn everyday citizens into powerful instruments to be used by the police in their fight against terror threats.
People would simply need to carry a GPS-enabled cellular phone with an embedded radiation detector and special software. If the embedded sensors detect abnormal levels of radiation in the surroundings, the system will send an alert to a data center. The onboard software would process in the background without the owner even noticing that his phone sent out an alert. The inventors claim that their system is advanced enough to ignore common sources of radiation, such as X-Ray machines in hospitals and airports.
One of the leading researchers on this project, Professor Fischbach, commented: "It's the ubiquitous nature of cell phones and other portable electronic devices that give this system its power. Cell phones today also function as Internet computers that can report their locations and data to their towers in real time."
This correspondent predicts similar applications to be developed in the future in order to further employ people as assets for the detection and reporting of threats. And it wouldn't be surprising, if future applications would empower mobile phones to be used for police messages to people in a crowd, such as signaling different emergency routes to the audience of a football stadium when a riot brakes out for instance. Hopefully there are a few entrepreneurs out there who are working on such needed systems?
Previous articles
July 2008 - 14 article(s) | show
June 2008 - 21 article(s) | show
May 2008 - 20 article(s) | show
April 2008 - 12 article(s) | show
March 2008 - 7 article(s) | show
February 2008 - 8 article(s) | show
January 2008 - 9 article(s) | show
December 2007 - 1 article(s) | show
November 2007 - 8 article(s) | show
October 2007 - 11 article(s) | show
September 2007 - 6 article(s) | show
Leave a Comment