A mobile cloud-based radiation monitoring system for citizens

Kobe City has been devastated by the huge HanshinAwaji Earthquake in 1995. Ever since, Kobe citizens had been active in disaster-related activities, calling on their personal experiences and strong personal commitment. Here we report on an initiative of Kobe Institute of Computing (KIC). Our system aims at giving citizens a monitoring capability of environmental radiation levels, to allow an independent confirmation besides the information provided by the government. The system is based on a newly developed, extremely high performance radiation detector, that enables rapid but precise measurements even on moving vehicles. We describe the technology, and we also show test results of real-time monitoring experiments obtained through collaboration with the NPO organization “Bikers Emergency Response Team” (BERT) [1]. We further consider the problem of efficient coverage of areas with the monitors, and for future monitoring work we propose a quantitative formulation of the route planning, that can be solved as a numerical optimization problem.