A smartphone app to monitor air quality

There are tons of smart phone apps, but wouldn’t it be great if one of those were able to monitor pollution?

Well, researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL) and the ETH Zurich are working on OpenSense, a project aimed at collecting data about cities’air quality, by connecting public transportation and mobile phone networks.

The laboratories are developing climate- and traffic-resistant sensors for vehicles, and designing ways to use mobile phones to access the data collected by the sensors.

According to the EPFL in fact the bus system is “mobile, secure, predictable, and spread out over a given area, buses are an ideal data collection base.”

There are still some issues to overcome, such as making sure that the system can see exactly where the sensors are as they’re picking up the information to ensure the data is attached to the location where it was collected, but once these problems are solved, the information acquired by the sensors could be extremely useful.

Parents could be more aware of the air quality in the areas their children play or go to school, while asthma sufferers could know what time of day pollution is at its lowest in their particular neighborhood so they can enjoy the outdoors more comfortably.

At the moment prototypes have been installed on the roof of a tram in Zurich and a bus in the Lausanne public transit system, which can collect atmospheric data, the presence of pollutants, and the quantity of particulates.