These days our cell phone gadgets can do a lot of things, from trading stocks to watching movies to mapping star constellations, but when things get really bad, can they save our lives?
Well, that might depend on how likely you are to die from radiation poisoning. Russian software developer Vladimir Elin is developing an innovative cell phone device that can instantly measure the radiation levels of any given place or thing.
Despite sounding more like a gadget from a James Bond movie than a practical app for everyday life, Elin says his Do-Ra device – short for the rather less catchy dosimeter-radiometer – is aimed at making life easier for ordinary people (and perhaps a few exiled Russian oligarchs.)
The entrepreneur first came up with the idea when he was writing an article about radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant spill in Japan earlier this year for an engineering magazine.
This summer, he took the device on a marketing tour of Japan, where it was well received by the country’s major cell phone manufacturers, including Fujitsu and Sony Ericsson.
The device is a small cell phone plug-in that works together with an easy-to-use smart phone app. It can measure radiation levels in both areas and foodstuffs.
“My radiation dosimeter will be invaluable to anyone living near potentially dangerous radioactive areas such as nuclear waste storage facilities or fall-out zones such as Fukushima or Chernobyl,” Elin said, swiping the gadget over a cup of steaming tea on his desk to show how it works. Within seconds the screen of the inventor’s cell phone flashes green, thankfully indicating a safe level of radiation.
“If the screen turns yellow, it means radiation levels are above average,” Elin says. “If it turns red, you need to run away as fast as you can.”
The device also features other apps that show the radiation levels of different parts of the user’s body and even produce a radiation risk map of the entire world.
Elin has already received recognition for his device both at home and abroad. In Russia, Intersoft Eurasia, the startup company Elin has set up around his invention, has joined the nuclear sciences cluster at the Skolkovo innovation hub and an international patenting commission has estimated the gadget’s value at around $200 million.
The inventor, who initially invested some $100,000 of his own money in the device, is in the process of patenting the working model of the gadget in 148 countries.
Elin said some of his competitors abroad are also working on similar devices, but are far behind him in terms of compactness. He is already patenting an idea to use the nano-sized material graphene to make the device even smaller. Elin says the material, whose invention won two Russian-born scientists the Nobel Prize for physics last year, will work well with his device due to its superconductive properties.
“Do-Ra is much more compact than the other gadgets on the market and it will be absolutely unbeatable when I use the graphene,” Elin said.