  We propose a feasible experimental scheme to direct measure heat and work in
cold atomic setups. The method is based on a recent proposal which shows that
work is a positive operator valued measure (POVM). In the present contribution,
we demonstrate that the interaction between the atoms and the light
polarisation of a probe laser allows us to implement such POVM. In this way the
work done on or extracted from the atoms after a given process is encoded in
the light quadrature that can be measured with a standard homodyne detection.
The protocol allows one to verify fluctuation theorems and study properties of
the non-unitary dynamics of a given thermodynamic process.
