Air quality monitoring

The air quality monitoring project came out of DATA Play 5 between Elixel and Controlled Frenzy who wanted to investigate a way to create a cheaper air quality monitor for use in residential neighbourhoods with primary school students to measure air quality around Plymouth.

The inspiration

It’s no news that air pollution can affect the health of the public – exposure to poor air quality can be attributed to more than 5 per cent of deaths in England. Towards the end of January it was reported that London hit level 10 on the Daily Air Quality Index, which caused widespread discussions and concerns about the air we breathe.

During this time, Elixel and Controlled Frenzy were already underway working on a not so secret project for Plymouth City Council’s DATA Play initiative which is all about opening up Plymouth’s data and creating an environment where people are encouraged to play and experiment with this data to benefit Plymouth and its residents. The 5th DATA Play was held in December 2016 and focused on health and wellbeing challenges.

The project

The challenge Elixel decided to tackle was to find ways to create a cheaper air quality monitor for use in our residential neighbourhoods. Straight away from this their heads started bursting with ideas on how they could unite air quality with the Internet of Things (IoT).

The idea they settled on was to create a Fitbit-style wearable piece of hardware with a companion app which runs on a smartphone. They would take the kit into a pilot school or code club where they would run a workshop with children showing them how to build their own monitor. Each child would take these monitors home and bring them back to their school/club at designated intervals to upload their data.

They brought in Creative Technologist and builder of rather cool things – Chris Hunt from Controlled Frenzy to help build a system capable of storing the essential air quality metrics and left him in charge of producing the wearable hardware.

The outcomes

With the DATA Play funding Elixel started to construct a prototype and companion app. The hardware itself is made up from a couple of key components including an Arduino 101 programmable board with bluetooth enabled, a sensor capable of recording fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in near real time and a rechargeable USB battery.

The companion app is equally simple, but has to reliably transmit the sensor data to a remote server – even when the app is not running in the foreground. In addition to this, it also provides the user’s geolocation with the PM data so a location can be attributed to a particular reading. They used the Ionic framework to quickly prototype the app together and the Mapbox mapping libraries to visualise the dataset.

This allowed hyper-local air quality readings and provided all of the data they needed to start visualising an approximate air quality index for areas within Plymouth. To visualise the air quality index, they adopted a portion of the UK Daily Air Quality Index scheme, excluding the other four pollutants not being collected.

An as DATA Play is all about open data and providing useful data to others, the data collected is automatically published to the DATA Place Plymouth as an anonymous open dataset. This will allow anybody else to work with the data in their own way and provide for the open data community.

In 2017, as part of the DATA Play nomination, the project was shortlisted for a Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Excellence Award in the ‘Best Innovative Environmental Health Solution’ category

The insights

So, exactly how accurate is the data they are providing? Existing air quality monitor equipment costs in the hundreds and thousands, so how can they construct a prototype for a fraction of that cost? To answer these questions they ran tests against an industry standard tool for measuring PM2.5 around a fixed circuit (you can see the results of this from their dataset around the Union Street region). Whilst the readings they have been receiving on the prototype are not completely matching up with the comparison equipment, there is a very clear and visible trend as to the spikes and fluctuations in particulate matter.

What they produced isn’t a full-on replacement for high grade equipment, but creates opportunities for community based data collection on a mass scale. Hopefully by crowdsourcing and relaying this information, it will allow people in the future to adjust their habits not only by the routes they take, but also in the methods of how they do so.

News
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Air quality monitoring