A UC San Diego expert introduces a new way to monitor the environment: through your mobile phone.

Engineer-turned-artist Shannon Spanhake and colleagues at the University of California San Diego and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has developing the Bluetooth-enabled gadget which can monitor the environment.

According to UCSD News, since 1990, San Diego’s population has risen by 1.8 million people, yet the number of its official pollution monitors has only increased by one.

That is why Spanhake has come up with a new and better way to monitor the environment: a personal pollution sensor called Squirrel.

There are only a handful of pollution sensors used by the Environmental Protection Agency to gauge pollution levels in San Diego County and a few more on the other side of the border in Mexico, Spanhake said.

It’s what happens next that makes Squirrel a powerful tool in the fight against pollution. Using a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, the device connects to the user’s cell phone. A software program called Acorn allows the user to see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cell phone’s display.

The phone also periodically transmits the environmental data to a public database on the Internet operated by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is funding Squirrel’s development.

It would be great if in the next development's research, the tool could become more smaller and smaller, so it can insert easily somewhere inside mobile-phone's body.

Sources: MedGadget, UCSD News