By David Ponce
We were amazed last time we mentioned the iPhone camera’s medical abilities: there’s an app to monitor not only heart rate, but also heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation. Yeah, and now it turns out your iPhone can be turned into a Geiger counter without the need of an extra accessory like the one from Scosche we talked about a while ago. See, all you have to do is block the camera with dark tape (electrician’s tape will do) and run this app, the Wikisensor. Turns out that radioactive particles can go through dark tape and be detected by the sensor on the iPhone’s camera as little flashes. Since no visible light is supposed to be coming through, the app correlates the little flashes to radioactivity. Its detection threshold is 5 MicroSieverts per hour.
Watch the video below to get an idea of what radioactivity looks like to your iPhone’s sensor. The Wikisensor application seems to cost $1 or 0,79 €.
[ Product Page ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]