Testing the possibilities of smart phones as an active radiation detector (Apprenticeship)

http://iradworldmap.com/Home.html:
"In a climate of mistrust about information on radioactivity, civil society has the possiblity to trust peers rather than NGOs or authorities".

http://www.wikisensor.org/:
"Get the truth about your environment, and rely on measures YOU perform, instead of using figures from nuclear industries and government bodies that have repeatedly proven unobjective and partial."

On March 11, 2011, the world was confronted with the second INES level 7 accident in 25 years. From that moment on, the public mistrust in the nuclear industry has grown dramatically together with the urge to know the absolute truth about the consequences of such accidents.

In a world where everyone has a smartphone it was only a matter of time before applications became available which claim to be able to measure the dose rate of the local environment.

The nuclear industry recognizes the usefulness of such applications but would like to point out the dangerous consequences in case of malfunctioning of these applications.

3 iPhone applications (iRad, Wikisensor and Radiation-Watch) will therefore be evaluated for different properties and compared to each other. The results will be communicated with the developer to ensure the reliability of the application towards the end-users.

Radiation-Watch uses a small external radiation detector which can be coupled to the iPhone. iRad and Wikisensor both use the sensitivity of the camera lens to ionizing radiation.

The applications will all be subjected to the same tests, i.e. the linearity of the dose-response, the reproducibility of the measurements, the energy dependency and the variation in the results between different iPhones. For all applications the lowest level of detection will be determined and the possibility of dose integration will be taken into consideration.

- testing the linearity of the dose response and the lowest level of detection

- testing the repeatibility of the dose measurements

- testing the energy response

- testing the reliablity of the results

- conclusion about the validity of the iPhone as a radiation detector