Read about this study from BU (http://www.bu.edu/...) about the amazing amount of methane leaks in Boston and wondered if there was a way to enable citizens to crowdsource such leaks and report them to the authorities and utilities. Of course, our noses can be effective natural gas detectors and Smell Something, Say Something is crowdsourcing methane leaks based on smell:
http://smellsomething.org
Yet, a cell phone methane sniffer would be useful and it looks like it is coming, along with a battery of environmental sensors for cell phones. The age of cell phone enabled citizens' monitoring will be here directly.
Sensordrone, a fully funded Kickstarter device, may be able to sense methane (http://www.kickstarter.com/...) and, after I asked them to, the Smart Citizen Kit, a Kickstarter that is still looking for funding (http://www.kickstarter.com/...), may be expanding to include methane sensing as well.
Another cell phone biosensor device is coming out of the University of Illinois:
http://news.illinois.edu/...
As a non-technical person who has long been interested in the importance of methane management, I've taken on the role of promoting the idea of such tools and techniques.
I've advanced the idea to SafeCast, the folks who built the bGeigie to enable citizen monitoring of radiation after Fukushima and are now expanding their work to other environmental issues: http://blog.safecast.org
I also notified Nathan Phillips, the professor at BU who did the methane leak study, and Natalie Jeremijenko of NYU who has done various environmental monitoring projects about the emerging possibility of cell phone methane sniffers.
Now I'm letting you know in the hopes that this will help speed up the introduction of affordable tools for more environmentally empowered citizens.