The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and several agencies in California have demonstrated second-generation prototype chemical sensors that work with smart phones to detect the presence of toxic chemical compounds and provide alerts to first responders and emergency authorities to improve situational awareness of potentially hazardous events and terrorist attacks, thus enabling smarter decisions and faster response times.
The recent demonstration and training exercise included the DHS Science and Technology branch, the Los Angeles Fire and Police Departments and the California Environmental Protection Agency, as part of a response to a carbon monoxide leak in a hotel room. The demonstration of the Cell-All technology included two sensor prototypes, one developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center and the other by the small firm Synkera Technologies and wireless technology company Qualcomm [QCOM].
During a web cast of the demonstration, participating officials in the exercise said that carbon monoxide is the deadliest gas that they are most concerned about. Carbon monoxide results in about 2,000 unintentional deaths in the U.S. annually, DHS says.
The ultimate goal of Cell-All is the development of very low cost and very low power sensors that can be integrated directly into commercial smart phones such as a Blackberry, iPhone or Droid, that are in use by hundreds of millions of people. Such a vast deployment of sensors, which could be heavily concentrated in areas given the common use of smart phones, could enable the creation of a sensor network that warns of hazardous chemical events and minimizes false alarms based on the number of phone-equipped sensors operating in a given location.
In the exercise, Cell-All was demonstrated in both the personal safety mode and as a network service.
“Cell-All has great potential as a tool for first responders,” says Los Angeles Fire Battalion Chief Corey Rose. “This technology holds the promise of giving firefighters a real-time awareness of some of the unseen hazards that are present in their environment, greatly enhancing their safety.”
Cell-All is aimed at both personal and public safety markets as well as certain work place uses.
For now, the sensor systems developed under Cell-All remain decoupled from the phone, although Bluetooth communications are used to send signals to the smart phones, which in turn are used to signal a command center, or even the user, of an event.
The sensor developed by Ames and its technology partner, Variable Technologies, is essentially a sleeve that can fit over a smart phone. The sensor technology is built into the sleeve, which in turn continuously sends real-time data to the phone, with the timing of alerts to a command center or the user set based on preferences.
Photos of the NASA device suggest it is about twice the length of a cell phone, suggesting that further shrinking of the technology is necessary before it would be widely used.
The sensor developed by Synkera and Qualcomm is about palm-size and also continuously sends real-time data to a smart phone while it is detecting an event.
A key attribute of the prototype Cell-All systems is that that the data sent to command centers and public health authorities is anonymous, meeting a privacy concern of members of the public that have been surveyed regarding the technology, DHS and industry officials say. Users would have the choice of setting their phone up to work in personal safety mode or to opt-in to a sensor network.
Next up for the effort is better working the technology and concepts of operations into the work flows of first responders, training of first responders, making the technology compelling from a business standpoint for consumers, carriers and phone makers, conducting user trials, cyber proofing the technology, and then scaling up production to meet very large demand, says Doug Hoffman, a Qualcomm official.
Relatively low costs are also necessary for the technology to be widely adopted in the commercial market. Hoffman says that a survey shows that phone manufacturers are willing to pay about 50 cents per sensor and related integration into their devices while consumers are willing to pay between $5 and $10 more per phone for the capability.
Current chemical detection capabilities that are deployed are large and expensive, says Stephen Dennis, technical director for the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency at DHS S&T. There are handheld systems that are less expensive but still costly and they are typically deployed after an event, he says. Moreover, current systems have coverage issues in that they “don’t reveal the environment where people are located most of the time,” he adds.
Cell-All offers the potential of a larger network of smaller, less costly sensors that are “located where people are,” Dennis says.