A quick proposal for Olympic athletes and anti-pollution activists in China and Asia. My idea: Create a cellphone-sized pollution monitoring device.

The Internet-enabled device, similar to the Particle Scan Pro shown in the video above, would feed into a common Google Map to give the live and historic pollution levels at highly specific locations.

Why? I just cannot relate to Hong Kong-style pollution measurements based on some street corner in the city center. I can, however, very much relate to the pollution level reported inside a shop I use or office I visit.

A portable pollution monitoring device would also allow people to track their personal pollution consumption over time. You might learn to avoid a certain busy road in rush hour and find a different route home.

For Olympic athletes, they could figure out for themselves where is the best place and time to do training in Beijing to avoid pollution.

The device shown in the video was brought over to my apartment by the local sales rep for the Swiss air filter company IQ Air. Their highly convincing sales pitch involves lining up half a dozen different air quality testing machines in your apartment to measure airborne particulate and organic matter.

How about it? This only requires marrying a particle detector to a GPS-enables phone. Nokia, please meet IQ Air.

There is a similar idea focussed on measuring the local concentration of CO2 that Bruno Giussani recently blogged – (See Open Spime). Thanks to the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, the category of time and place aware device I described has a name. It is a Spime.

Technorati Tags: air pollution, IQ air, Particle Scan Pro, Olympics, Pollution, China, Nokia, Spime, Bruno Guissani