Monitoring pollution in living colour

A normal PC and webcam are being used to monitor the build-up of environmentally important gases such as carbon monoxide and NOx, in a research project under way at

division of applied physics in

.

The technique, which is being developed by a team of Swedish and Italian scientists led by Anders Lundström, could also provide medical diagnoses in remote areas.

'Computer and web cameras are generally available and we would like to provide analytical capabilities to this platform,' Lundström said. 'The real demonstration of its potential came with our recent work using porphyrins to detect environmentally interesting pollutants.'

Lundström's team have been working on a way to use a webcam to transmit colorimetry information — the measure of colour, hue, purity and brightness — from test strips using porphyrins. These are a class of organic compounds, many of which include metal atoms, such as haemoglobin, which tend to be highly coloured, and can change colour when they bind to gas molecules.