This is how your smartphone can prevent poisoning

Measuring whether you can drink water or another liquid or not is very simple: you can do it with your smartphone!

Smartphones are full of interesting technology to make everyday life easy. This kind of technology is sometimes in the things you see, but mostly in the things you don’t. Did you know, for example, that you can measure water pollution or the degree of pollution of a liquid with your smartphone?

Research

The University of Cambridge draws this conclusion after an experiment with liquids on a smartphone screen. As a result of their research, it became clear that the sensors in a smartphone can measure contamination in liquid. This concerns ‘ionic contamination’, polluting particles that can occur in ‘wild water’. So you can measure the degree of ionic contamination and thus know whether you can drink water or not.

Sensors

The whole story is a bit tricky and for that you have to read the entire research report, but the simple version is something like the following. A smartphone screen has several methods of measuring touch, including an electric ‘field’ on its surface. This field senses when your finger touches the screen and can pinpoint exactly where you pressed. Because this is a reaction of the electric field, there are also other sources that can give a reaction. Such as ionic contamination in water or liquid.

Accessible

It is not the case that smartphones are suddenly a global means of measuring contamination: you have to turn it around. The aim of the study was to see whether you can conduct such an easily accessible contamination study, using only a smartphone. So we succeeded: it was the intention of the research that the smartphone in question was not specially modified.

What the practice will look like with this research is not yet certain, but it is clear that the same reaction with more types of molecules is now being looked at. For example, your smartphone could eventually measure any liquid and perhaps even become a kind of portable pH meter. As an outdoor goer or nature freak, you can simply measure with your phone whether you can drink something or not. (via University of Cambridge)