The day of the "iSniff" nears

Scientists at DHS have for some time now been interested in combining four technologies — the cell phone, GPS, phone camera/video, and biological and chemical sensing devices — in small enough and cheap enough a package that Americans would buy it. This would create what may well be described as a citizen army of walking monitors. In extreme cases, even if an individual were to perish in a terrorist biological of chemical attack, his cell phone would transmit to the authorities an accurate picture of the source of his or her death — the attack location and the agents used by the terrorists in the attack.

We are not yet there, but we may be inching closer. Once large enough to be mistaken for terrorist bombs, portable air pollution monitors are now being reduced in size into smaller and smaller wearable devices that can be easily dispatched for environmental detective work: Is black carbon soot emitted by school buses contributing not just to warming global temperatures, but raising childhood asthma rates, too? These new pocket-size sensors could provide more practical and powerful detection of such potential public health risks.

Scientific American’s Lynne Peeples writes that environmental health scientists have grown more interested in personal air pollution tracking in recent years. They realize that bringing monitoring down from the rooftops — where devices have breathed cities’ concoctions of exhaled pollutants for many years — can help to identify the variability in exposures among people as well as during an individual’s day-to-day activities.

Average particulate matter concentrations across regions, for example, rarely reveal the specific air particles people breathe in any given location. “The problem is, not many people live on rooftops. Most people live in floors as you go down, and walk about on city streets, and get around by cars, subways or buses,” says Steven Chillrud, an environmental geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Environment Observatory. “So, if you really want to know what people are exposed to, you need to monitor them.

This is especially true of children. “They get exposed to stranger dust in half an hour of playing than you or I would get in an entire month,” says James Cowin of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., recollecting his childhood days chasing after trucks spouting clouds of DDT.

Street-level monitoring
This fall, dozens of nine- and 10-year-olds will be set loose on the streets and in the schools of New York City