What is it about?
Poor air quality is responsible for millions of premature deaths. While governments have installed networks of fixed-location air quality measurement instruments to measure air quality these are expensive and only cover a limited area. Relatively cheap mobile sensors have also recently become available allowing for greater coverage at the cost of reduced accuracy. We examine the performance of these sensors in London and determine if they can be used to create an application that would allow people to avoid areas with poor air quality while commuting.
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Why is it important?
Poor air quality is unfortunately still all too common in large cities and can have severe consequences for residents of these cities. New mobile sensors offer a way to gather more data on the air quality in these cities but the accuracy of these sensors is still somewhat concerning. The work examines these sensors and gives several interesting insights into areas where air quality is poor. These include locations that would be expected like busy traffic junctions but unexpected areas such as along canals and hidden construction sites.
Perspectives
I think the data gathered from this project was quite interesting and included several surprising insights into the air quality of London. While the lack of correlation between the mobile sensors is concerning and disappointing it is my belief that with further research a very detailed real-time map of the air quality of a city could be created. This would allow city residents to make informed choices with regard to their health while also considering the duration of their commute.
Joseph Doyle
Queen Mary University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: RealTimeAir, August 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3538393.3544933.
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