A Unique Environmental Mobile Device for Detecting Hazardous Chemicals

According to an analysis conducted by Greenpeace, “one in three Americans is at risk of a poison gas disaster by living near one of hundreds of chemical facilities that store and use highly toxic chemicals. A chemical disaster at just one of these facilities could kill or injure thousands of people with acute poisoning [1].” Because of the common proximity between residences and chemical facilities in the United States (U.S.), hazardous chemical detection and early warning systems is vital and frequently missing feature of public safety systems. In many instances, the cost of chemical detection equipment and monitoring systems is prohibitively expensive, preventing concerned citizens from participating in a hazardous chemical detection and early warning system. To address the need for an affordable, distributed, off-the-shelf hazardous chemical detection early warning system, this paper presents a method for designing and prototyping a unique environmental mobile device (EMD) for detecting hazardous chemicals. Employing affordable gas sensors, the EMD measures and communicates hazardous chemical concentrations to an Android smartphone or tablet custom-design app which time stamps and geolocates the measurements. Initial development efforts have focused on recording variability in sound levels, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels in the outdoor environment. The data logged by the EMD and app is then uploaded to an interactive web-based map that displays both individual and aggregated routing information. Both the smartphone app and web app use a simple color scale (green, yellow, orange, red) to indicate the intensity of the sensor readings at a particular place and time. In the future, the EMD and smartphone app could be used as part of distributed hazardous chemical detection and early warning system that would deliver real-time information and alerts to communities that may be at risk of hazardous chemical exposures.