A Skolkovo resident startup has submitted a radiation detector into Google’s Project Ara competition, a global initiative launched by the California tech giant to find the best replaceable module for a new customizable smartphone.
The DO-RA team, part of Skolkovo nuclear technologies resident JSC Intersoft Eurasia, already produces the dosimeter as a hardware add-on for current smartphones, allowing consumers to measure radioactivity in their immediate vicinity and within food with the help of a downloadable app.
Now DO-RA has converted the device into a module for Project Ara, a budget smartphone that Google plans to release next year. It allows users to chop and change hardware as they please with handy clip-in components.
The Do-RA module (center) in a photograph provided by the company.
“The DO-RA team has decided to try its fate and take part in Google’s open international project, experience cooperation with international design teams, and ensure an additional stream of orders for its future products of its DO-RA.Modul line,” the company said in a press release Friday.
DO-RA says its module can be of particular use in car sat-nav systems, as well as in home appliances including coolers, freezers, cupboards and liquids storage for centralized and personal environmental monitoring.
Google is offering a top prize of $100,000 for the best module, and plans to begin producing the base smartphone, on an Android operating system, next year. Modules will be available for purchase separately.
“At the end of the day, we really hope we’ll put our label on the Ara phone,” project manager Vladimir Elin told sk.ru.
A logistics error meant Google failed to send DO-RA the developers kit required to get the specifications exactly right, but the company has forged ahead nonetheless and will send its module to Google on December 1.
“I think without the developer kit, we feel that it’s 50-50 that we’ll win something,” Elin said.
Elin’s team just happened to be updating its original dosimeter by incorporating super-compact silicon-based technology. That technology needed just a little tweaking to turn it into the module required for the Google competition.
The updated dosimeter has already received orders from South Korea, Japan and China, the direct result of a Skolkovo networking trip to Hong Kong earlier this year.
Google announced in March that the base kit of the Ara frame, display, operating system, battery module, processor and WiFi module would be included in a preliminary $50 retail price.
Three frame sizes will be available – small, regular and tablet.
Media reports say Toshiba has already submitted a detachable fitness module that can be placed inside a wristband for exercise and then returned to the phone, with Globalstar offering a satellite connectivity module and others working on a blood sampler.