Plug-and-Play Sensor Modules on Cars to Map Air Pollution
Aclima, a San Francisco-based company that designs and deploys environmental sensor networks, is partnering with Google Earth Outreach to map and better understand urban air quality. The partnership will equip Google Street View cars with Aclima's mobile sensing platform. Aclima's plug-and-play sensor modules are calibrated and adapted to provide detailed, environmental data. The networks measure a broad spectrum of variables, including noise, humidity, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and methane. The technology was successfully tested in Denver, CO, where the Aclima team was able to instrument three Google Street View vehicles. The cars collected 150 million air quality data points over a month of driving around Denver.
Transcript
00:00:04 many of the sounds that you hear around me right now are sources of pollutants we've got buses we've got trucks getting close to a rush hour time so there's more and more traffic all of those are emitting pollutants that are important that go into the mix of the city 54% of the world's population now lives in urban centers and each of our cities our systems and our energy choices our
00:00:27 transportation choices the weather all in War the quality of life that we experience in cities so for regular citizens it's not always easy to find out what their air quality is at the street level by making this kind of information available and accessible to everyone we're hoping that regular citizens and decision makers alike can all join in and be part of that dialogue
00:00:48 to make improvements to our environment to our air putting air monitors in vehicles where we actually map all the streets of a community throughout the state or a country was an idea that came from the Google acclima interaction that we hadn't thought of that seemed like an obvious next step and a perfect way to move this whole science forward having a combination of big data and good sensor
00:01:15 technology also with miniaturization and low cost that's really going to expand the usefulness of air pollution data being able to see the air around you through the data that would come out of mobile monitor ing gives us opportunities that we had never thought that we would have before there's a global call for hyper local air quality and climate data right now citizens
00:01:42 scientists policy makers businesses governments around the world need access to this information our initial test of our ability to map the environment was performed in Denver through our relationship with the EPA we were aware of a couple of research programs that were occurring in Denver during the summer of 2014
00:02:01 this was a really unique opportunity for us to work with aklima aklima brought this whole new generation and thinking of how we could actually use sensored technology what was really exciting in denro is that we were able to instrument three cars three Google street food vehicles that allowed us to map intensely maybe one region of the city or have our cars being in different
00:02:22 regions of the City Denver demanded incredible effort an incredible amount of resources and endless hours to really deliver on the platform and so it helped acclima and Google understand exactly what it was going to take to scale this we already had the infrastructure both software and Hardware built up to be able to put a sensor in a car read that data and automatically have a go to our
00:02:49 system for processing we had already developed those tools by our large scale indoor deployment this year we tested the technology in Denver and it worked great and so over the next year we're going to be testing and see how viable it is to measure air pollution in more cities at the same time we will be expanding our mapping efforts to the Bay Area and working with
00:03:10 communities and Community groups here and scientists to really explore the possibilities embedded in this information our hope is that one day this information is as accessible as the weather that you can access this information on a daily basis and that together we can make billions and billions of smarter decisions add up to change the partnership with aklima is a
00:03:33 transformative step to really advancing air quality monitoring and and what its potential is for the future this is something that is going to be very useful to anybody who lives here on this planet this kind of data will inform decision making at all levels Google and ACA want to deliver a new level of environmental awareness to communities across the country and and that has the
00:04:01 potential to really be transformative for the first time we'll have a human scale understanding of what's happening in our environment and how it's directly affecting us [Music]