Chemistry and Mobile Phones

Cell Phone Spectrometer - Chemistry and Cellphones

 Mobile phones equipped with CMOS cameras (and of digital cameras directly exporting JPG files) can be used as inexpensive, portable spectrophotometric devices. Spectrophotometry makes more sense, particularly to students, when they can see light change intensity when passed through a sample than when they can only see equations or the output of a computer screen or meter. In a paper entitled “Cell Phone Spectrometer: Learning Spectrophotometry by Building and Characterizing an Instrument” A. Scheeline and K. Kelley of the University of Illinois  report the construction and give the hardware, software, and laboratory instructions for a diffraction spectrograph/cell phone (or digital camera) array detector suitable for high school and college students.

Chemistry by Mobile Phones

A system has been produced for the real- time monitoring of experiments whilst away from the lab by combining automatic environment monitoring with Java smartphones. J.M. Robinson and coworkers monitor changes in the laboratory environment by encapsulating them as simple XML messages, which are published using an MQTT compliant broker. Clients subscribe to the MQTT stream, and produce a user display. An MQTT client written for the Java MIDP platform, can be run on a smartphone with a GPRS Internet connection freeing analysts from the constraints of the lab. J.M. Robinson et al. in a paper entitled “Chemistry by Mobile Phone” present an overview of the technologies used, and how these are helping chemists make the best use of their time.