AirSense

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.

This application allows you to get local and worldwide updates in the air using NASA, crowdsource and public data with AirSense. To protect yourself and raise awareness about air pollution. Furthermore to check symptoms, learn how to handle them and see how many are sharing your struggle. AirSense offers real time temperature and air humidity updates along with useful facts which may help you, or those around you.

-We used the text to speech module to ease the access to the visually impaired, and to add a warm welcome to the users. After that we had a Skype conference with a representative from IBM and got advice about using their modules for further development of the application.

-We also used the local meteorological website that uses data, calculations and measurements from weather stations spread all across the country (Macedonia). The data provided by these weather stations is allowed for public use (open data).

-For the data to calculate the measurements like Air Quality Index we used the open-data provided by the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning.

-We didn't want to work in a "closed" box, so we also exchanged ideas and opinions with a team in Algeria through a Skype conference, the team was also working on the same project (Aircheck).

-We spoke to an expert in the field of climate changes, Dragana Bojovic from NASA / USAID