AIR QUALITY DATA SOURCE

Develop an app or platform to crowd-source information for comparing changes in environmental factors, such as temperature, relative humidity, air pollution, with occurrence of symptoms of allergies and respiratory diseases. Create tools for public entry and grading of symptoms, including but not limited to cough, shortness of breath, wheezing, sneezing, nasal obstruction, itchy eyes; and geographic mapping of symptom frequency and intensity. Create a platform for comparison of symptom map with NASA provided data, with visualization options for web and/or smart phone.

Pollution generated by humanity is a huge environmental problem that is affecting the health of general population. If the quality of the air we breathe is deficient, we could suffer different diseases, from a simple cough to pneumonia. In today’s world, local governments must be aware of contamination levels that exist among the city, so they can find ways to solve this problem and benefit the quality of life of its inhabitants.

Chimichangapp team is currently designing an air pollution measurement system that will be located in several points of Bogota’s public transportation system stations as well as some buses of the integrated transportation system (SITP in Spanish). The main objective is to create a data source of air quality in Bogota, this data will be available on a web page to the general public. Information will be displayed on different ways, a map where the user will see the pollution of the area or the whole city at a certain time of the day, graphics and statistics of the pollution through the day, month and year. This data will be useful for everybody, the local government could design new programs to reduce contamination levels, people will choose an ideal place to rise the children or new proposals to change and improve the air quality on their living area.

This system will be composed of a sensor’s network and a centralized server; the sensor’s network will be divided in two branches; static measurement and mobile measurement. Static measurement will be on several stations, taking constant data of air quality this data will be sent to the centralized server; mobile measurement will be made with installed sensors on SITP buses, this measurements will included GPS position, air quality and time of the reading, the data collected by the buses will be downloaded at the buses parking garages and sent to the centralized server.

The received information will be processed on the centralized server, this server will generate the graphics and statistics, and upload them to the system webpage where the user will have the chance to download the information in, excel format, images, graphics and statistics that will be displayed on the webpage. The excel format includes the information of the measurement area, GPS position, time, pollution, day, month and year.

The sensor’s network will be made with designed hardware for the specific propose of measuring air quality, this hardware will include but not limited to, its own power supply system, CO gas semiconductor sensor and the needed circuitry to proper function, ADC circuitry and transmission ; this hardware design may include more features to improve the data collection.

At this stage of the project, we have use:

Google maps
MatLab.
IEEE Xplore Digitla Library
Arduino Uno
MQ-9 CO gas sensor shield

We have collected some data using the arduino and the sensor shield to make a preliminary test of how the map should look after some readings in different places