Air Map

Air Map helps you navigate your city through air quality spots.

Air Map helps you navigate your city through air quality spots. Our project tackles three steps for improving air quality including taking measurements, displaying the data, and comparing it against trends in mobility. In order to gather more air quality data, since the currently available sets we found were not sufficient, we decided to use a simple and inexpensive Arduino BLE control board connected to an air quality sensor. This sensor can be mounted to vehicle license plate and connect over Bluetooth to the driver's phone so transmit air quality data over a range of locations and make it publicly available in Verizon's ThingSpace. We used the air quality gathered to generate a MapQuest heat map to clearly show where heavy pollution is detected within a particular region. This allows residents to avoid pollution and improve their health when making decisions such as choose which routes to take on their morning workout or selecting a park to visit with their kids. See code below for how we did it. In addition to making people aware of the air quality around them, we also provide insight into how to improve it. Using the Arity mobility trends APIs we were able to provide information within a region about the movement of automobiles, a primary cause of air pollution. In our display, a user can select the zip code of their region of concern and get information about how many people are traveling to their or from their location at a particular time as well as where they are coming from or returning to. This information combine with air quality by location can help people identify patterns that might lead them to finding ways of reducing pollution. For example, if too many people are driving to the park for the weekend for BBQs and increasing pollution, our application can help determine if the best solution is a bus route and where to put it, more efficient BBQs, or a new park closer to the visitors' homes.