Navigate Around Your City’s Pollution Hot Spots

We all know pollution is a big deal, and some cities, like Los Angeles, are known for how poor the air quality is. Cairo, Egypt, for example, is so bad that roughly half of all lifelong residents will develop some sort of respiratory problems from the pollution in the air. But, for those trying to protect their health, avoiding an entire city can be unrealistic.

Now a project from TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2017 could lend much more granular data for avoiding pollution hot spots within a city. While overall pollution within a city or region is still a top priority, local climate zones and pollutions sources still produce smaller localized areas with high pollution. One part of a city, where traffic is heavy or industrial activity is high, could have poorer air quality than other parts of that same city.

Air Map could be a tool to help you navigate around those high-pollution areas by monitoring air quality around the city. The system uses a vehicle-mounted air quality sensor, which connects to an Arduino BLE board. As you drive around, data about the air quality is sent from the Arduino to your phone and then uploaded to a database.

That database provides two very useful resources: a map to show users where the pollution is worst (so they can avoid it), and data about overall trends. The map is important if you want to keep yourself and your family away from the worst pollution, but the overall trends could be significant for improving air quality in a city overall. With that data, new regulations or even simple traffic optimization could reduce a city’s pollution as a whole.