Intel's Berkeley Labs team is working with the City of San Francisco to attach mobile phone prototype sensors to a fleet of street
sweepers zooming around the city in the early morning hours. (Intel photo)
by Zack Beauchamp, CQ staff
For the roughly 75 million Americans afflicted with asthma or allergies , air quality can be a deadly serious issue. Air pollution can set off sometimes-fatal asthma attacks, and can cause otherwise healthy people to get the disease. To help the most vulnerable people limit exposure, the federal government issues a daily air quality report, which includes cities with "action alert" days. http://www.airnow.gov/. But there's not much detail there.
Enter San Francisco and the Intel Corporation. They're piloting a new technique of measuring hyper-local air quality with sensors on the city's street sweepers.
These sensors take measurements of air quality every sixty seconds.
They're looking for levels of harmful compounds such as carbon monoxide
and ground level ozone which can cause asthma attacks and other
respiratory problems. The data go directly from the sweeper into a
central database that, one day, will be accessible to the general
public. Folks would be able to avoid the most dangerous areas of the
city.
The street sweeper program is the brainchild of Eric Paulos, a Senior
Research Scientist at Intel., who worked with San Francisco's
Department of Public Works and Office of the Environment.
Paulos is looking beyond the sweepers. He notes that people's own cell phones already
contain a variety of sensors that, with the right adjustments, could be
used to measure air quality. The cell phone users would also upload
their data to the information bank. Paulos calls this an extension of
the "I know my neighborhood best" principle to air quality management.
He says the purpose of this program is twofold: "to give citizens the
power to share information [with each other], and to augment the data
already made available by the EPA and city governments."
San
Franciscans will soon get to test this out for themselves; the data
from the street sweepers will go online around the end of July. Though
the program is so far mostly limited to San Francisco and another trial
in Ghana, Paulos says he "would love to get more involved" with other
city and municipal governments.
![[RSS]](http://67.192.49.194/templates/images/rss_icon.gif){kind=icon}
Post A Comment