New App Lets You Check Air Pollution Levels

Thanks to sensors installed on trams that send data live to mobile applications, people can check air pollution levels around the city on their phones with a just click and in real time. The technology was developed at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)'s Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, and could be available to the public in the near future.

Transcript

00:00:05 so this new app is about quality sensing it is called mobile observatory and from it name you can guess that it allows user to observe places for environmental parameters like for example you can watch out what are the temperature humidity but also air quality um values like for example ozone level or also particulate matter or a CO level this application and this project is based on

00:00:29 the open sense project which is a collaboration project between epfl and eth uh in the framework of this project we developed sens sensor boxes which are boxes that contain sensors for humidity temperature ozone particulate matter and also CO2 and these boxes are put on roof of buses in Lan and TRS in CC then the data is aggregated on servers and from these

00:00:53 servers we uh take everything in losan so that we can process the information and generate indices these indices are then pushed to the application uh on the mobile phones according to the to the selection of the users to the places that they want to monitor I have selected several locations that I either leave or study or work so I can check um how the air quality in those places

00:01:16 are and um it's nice to observe for example that where I live their quality is better than in the center of theory main advantage of this application is that we are dealing with realtime values it is more Dynamic application it allows user to correlate what they see on the screen and what is happening around for example they can notice that places are more polluted

00:01:36 than others regarding on what is the traffic around and also defining what is the best route for joking or other kind of activity outdoor but also this has um kind of educational uh goal by having people learn to recognize or to see or to sense things that's human actually cannot really sense like air quality or this kind of uh ozone level or this kind of other values