Detecting Radiation Levels in Fukushima: an example of crowdsourcing

Challenge: fast design of a radiation detection sensor board for Waspmote in response to the accident in Fukushima.

The creation of the Radiation Sensor Board was motivated by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima after the unfortunate earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011. We wanted to help authorities to measure the levels of radiation of the affected zones without compromising the life of the security and rescue teams. For this reason we designed in just 3 weeks a Geiger Counter sensor board for Waspmote, which could read the radiation levels automatically and send the information in real time using wireless technologies like ZigBee and 3G/GPRS to the control point without human intervention.