This clever smartphone attachment will show if water or air is contaminated

Mumbai, July 24: Do you know that how much fine dust is around you in the atmosphere in the place where you are living or by seeing waterbodies nearby can you tell how much the water is contaminated? No? Then your phone can help you out to measure the quantity of fine dust present in the air and quality of the air too and also with a snap of a picture, you can tell that it’s contaminated by this small device to be attached.

 

The device named iSPEX works on this basis:

Aerosols interact with sunlight —they scatter and absorb sunlight, and they change its polarization (a property of light). With iSPEX you measure both the sunlight intensity and polarization. This means that an iSPEX measurement contains information on the amount and on the type and size of aerosol(s) in the atmosphere. On a very sunny day with a perfect blue sky without any clouds or aerosols, the sunlight that you can observe at the Earth’s surface is at its most intense and it is polarized. In contrast, on a very hazy day with a large number of aerosols the sunlight is far less intense and polarized.

 

Also, it is a simple smartphone attachment that makes it ridiculously, comically easy to measure the quality of water by pointing the tool at it, nothing more. The technology is still in its early stages, and at least a couple of years away. The hope is to combine cutting-edge astronomy technology with environmental science to create a device that’s both easy to use, and is capable of measuring the quality of surface water accurately.