I feel like its something we'll see in the not to distant future given the amount of interest in that sort of thing, especially for medical purposes. What's your thought?
I would hope so, as the technological side of things are moving briskly forward. Yet, if I'm honest, I don't see things panning out as idealistic as I'd wish. 'It's complicated'.
Unfortunately much of these advances cited above are academic efforts. How this translates to a product usable 'in the field' is perhaps more clear in the medical device world than in environmental monitoring.
I'd like to believe one could 'crowd-source' pollution monitoring. Open source sensors, drive costs down, collect data, throw it atop an OpenStreetMap layer and somehow the populus as a whole could make better informed decisions in resource consumption/politics/whatever.
Yet these types of studies (presently) are best carried out by governments and academic researchers for a number of reasons (land rights, use of 'mixed use' satellites, calibration, etc). Take water pollution for instance. The USGS builds 'The National Map' [1] which has a data layer for water runoff [2] (rivers,streams,etc), pollution sources [3], and whatever data sources are hidden in EPA, private mining/gas industires, Army Corp of Engineers, etc databases. The GIS work to make sense of even existing data is daunting. Add to it the polical winds of Fiscal Sequestration and 'less-regulation' and things look grim.
That said, microfluidics and biomarkers are moving more ino the Hacker realm and out of the cleanroom. And ultimately it's how well the Hacker community interacts with academia/goverment...
Folks interested in this kind of thing from a hacker / citizen-science angle might be interested in http://publiclaboratory.org/ , "The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science".
