AboutAt the time of this writing, I am a 4th year medical student going into Emergency Medicine. In the hospital, you are frequently around large machines that put out radiation (CT scanners, X-ray machines, fluoroscopes, etc), and I've always been curious to know how much radiation I encounter on the day to day. Not because I necessarily think that I am exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation (you wear lead garments to protect yourself as a healthcare provider), but because I am nerdy like that.
Having said that, hopefully it's not too much of a surprise when I tell you that building a fitness tracker-like device (counting radiation instead of steps) seemed like the only logical thing for me to do. Hence, the RadBit. A Bluetooth wearable radiation sensor based on the low-voltage Teviso RD3024 nuclear radiation sensor and the Bean+ from LightBlue.
As a medical student, I don't have a whole lot of time to work on this, but after a year of tinkering here and there, I finally have a working device. The code is currently very messy, which I hope to clean up, but use at your own risk. The RadBit logs both the counts-per-minute and the time every 60 seconds to a FRAM memory chip from Adafruit. It spits it back out in bulk over serial when a specific byte is written to a Scratch characteristic on the Bean+.
Radiation DataI took the data from today and threw it into Tableau.
I spent some time in the Interventional Radiology suite today.
FYI: I had the sensor on the outside of my lead apron, so fortunately that does not equal my actual exposure. For some reference, 50 mSv is about about 7 chest CT's or the maximum allowable radiation exposure per year for a nuclear power plant worker (The average person receives about 4 mSv per year).
The classic radiation chart from XKCD.
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