Ignore the distracting colors and this graphic gives you a good idea of how Cell-All will work
The Department of Homeland Security wants to turn your mobile phone into a bomb-sniffing, nuke-detecting, bio-toxin analyzer to help them thwart terrorist plots. There’s been talk about this kind of crowd-sourced tech becoming a reality for years now, but the DHS is now in a position to actually do something about it. They want to turn your smartphone into a mobile detector for things like “dirty” bombs and chemical attacks – like a trained bomb-sniffing dog, only small enough to fit in your pocket and without as much hair or teeth. It’s called Cell-All, and it could save your life.
Think about it. Your cellphone – although, if you’re reading this, you probably use a smartphone – is one of the few always-on, always-connected electro-gizmos in your life. Thanks to its wireless data connection, it will update you when you get a new email. It will give you weather information, stock prices, and even give you a heads up on that upcoming calendar appointment. And, it’s not just you – there are millions of these devices roaming the US – many of them concentrated in terrorist-friendly metropolitan areas. Why not leverage those fleets of smartphones to detect dangerous chemicals in the air, and help the DHS prepare for imminent terrorist attacks?
The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate has announced plans for their new “Cell-All” program. The idea is to “equip your cell phone with a sensor capable of detecting deadly chemicals.” The DHS S&T says that the sensors would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a dollar per sensor, making it commercially feasible for companies to integrate them into their handsets. “Our goal is to create a lightweight, cost-effective, power-efficient solution,” says Stephen Dennis, Cell-All’s program manager.
The Cell-All technology would be one part hardware (sensor) and one part software. The software would keep the sensor active all the time, running in the background as an invisible process. The Cell-All would constantly sample the air in search of suspicious levels of “volatile chemical compounds” – the kind that could wreak havoc on a crowded subway station, for example.
When Cell-All detects something in the air (literally), it’ll do a couple things. It’ll alert you to the potentially dangerous situation through a vibration, text message, or phone call – the idea is to give you a heads-up on your environment and give you time to high-tail it out of the immediate vicinity. Cell-All will also send location data and air sample analysis data back to a centralized emergency monitoring facility. The idea here is to help officials quickly and efficiently get a handle on a developing emergency situation.
And, that’s where the crowd-sourced angle comes into play. The DHS wants to embed this technology in as many smartphones as possible, with the aim of having millions of devices scouring the nation for signs of impending terrorist attacks. With a large enough sample size, the technology has the potential to put an air-sniffing sensor on every street corner (or multiple sensors per street corner, depending on market penetration) in America.
Privacy nuts, this part is for you. Cell-All will apparently be an opt-in offering. “Privacy is as important as technology,” says Dennis. “After all, for Cell-All to succeed, people must be comfortable enough to turn it on in the first place.” That’s good news for tin-foil types, but it does raise the question of whether this particular technology can hit critical mass (no nuclear pun intended) – an important aspect of any crowd-sourced service.
The DHS S&T is already working with Qualcomm, LG, Apple, and Samsung to research and develop Cell-All tech. With a little luck, we could have as many as 40 working prototypes in about a year. Unfortunately, they’ll be early-generation devices capable of sniffing out carbon monoxide and fires.
It’ll only be a matter of time before the cellphone in your pocket starts sniffing the air for dangerous compounds. We just have to wonder what else our own smartphones will be smelling, what with them being stored in the dingy depths of our front pockets.