Israel’s Radiation App

These days, we’re warned that everything will give us cancer —diet soda, air pollutants and perhaps most prominently, cell phones.

But according to an Israeli high-tech startup, there’s an app for that. Or at least, there was, until Apple banned the product from its iPhone application store.

“Once you reach a red zone where your phone emits a high level of radiation, we provide some audio alert,” said Gil Friedlander, founder and CEO of Tawkon, the Israeli company that created the app. “You could ignore our indication or if you choose to have a glance at the screen you find a suggestion as to how you can reduce your radiation level.”

The app, developed by engineers at the InfoTel radiation lab in Herzliya, uses an algorithm to measure the radio frequency accumulated during a call and from there estimates just how much radiation your body is absorbing, he explained.

But Apple has banned the app from its store, telling Tawkon reps that a diagnostic tool such as this one would create confusion among iPhone users, reported a tech blogger, Roi Carthy, on TechCrunch.com.

“This ties very well with the values of Apple and the interest of iPhone users, who are mostly young people that would like to get this information. We also think that the iPhone 3G’s device is a very good device that has very low radiation levels,” Friedlander told The Jewish Week.

“We do not think this should create any fear, but at the end of the day we understand that we need to have the users vote for this application.”

Friedlander and his team remain hopeful that Apple will reverse its decision, and meanwhile, they plan to launch a version for the BlackBerry next week and for the Android sometime in the near future.