Patent ID: 7916015

Claim:
A monitoring system for detecting environmental conditions, comprising: a sensing unit including one or more sensors for obtaining data related to environmental conditions, the one or more sensors including at least one of a radiation sensor, and first and second orthogonal chemical sensors that use dissimilar technologies to detect a chemical at dissimilar detection thresholds; an air pump for providing air flow to at least one of the one or more sensors; a controller interfaced with the sensing unit for receiving, interpreting and encoding the data related to environmental conditions into a predetermined format, wherein the controller determines whether to encode an alarm condition into the data in a predetermined format based on whether the first and the second chemical sensors both detect the chemical, and whether the first and second chemical sensors each detect the chemical for a predetermined duration of time; and a communication device including a display for receiving the data in a predetermined format from the controller, including the alarm condition, if present, forming an e-mail message and transmitting the e-mail message including the data in a predetermined format to at least one predetermined e-mail address.