Ultraviolet Radiation Measurement via Smart Devices

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation has a great impact on human health. Nowadays, the public basically gets information about UV radiation through weather forecasts, which can only provide rough and average prediction for a certain large area. Since CMOS sensors in smartphone cameras are very sensitive to UV radiation, smartphones have potential to be the ideal equipment to measure it. At the same time, result optimization can be achieved in real time by taking advantage of fog computing because fog servers are able to aggregate UV radiation data and compute the results at local areas. This paper exhaustively discussed a novel procedure that could measure UV radiation through smartphone cameras, and also briefly covered how to leverage fog computing to improve UV measurement accuracy. To implement the procedure, an Android app called UV meter was developed. Experiments were conducted by utilizing the app to validate and evaluate the correctness and accuracy of the procedure on both smartphones and smart watches. Results showed that the proposed procedure could achieve an average of 95% accuracy of a typical professional digital UV meter, and could be easily implemented on smart devices.