Scintilla

Global Winner

Scintilla won a Global Award!

THE CHALLENGE: Aircheck
Earth

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.

Explanation

Scintilla mitigates the impact of poor air quality on the global community by democratizing air quality data collection.

Leveraging social media, the Scintilla web portal, and Azure’s cognitive services – text analysis tool, the system collects real time, local, human sentiment on air pollution.

Next, integrating data from our own local ground sensor network, the EPA's monitoring stations, and EOSDIS and GES DISC's various earth orbiting satellites Scintilla calculates a real time air quality score for any location on Earth based on the EPA’s Air Quality Index algorithm.

Consumers can check their local AQI score through the web portal on their computer or mobile device. While enterprise partners, like fitness tracker manufactures, can access the data through an open API and use it to better educate their users on the impact of air quality.

Finally, correlating AQI scores with local human feedback through our sentiment analysis, it is possible to better understand impact of air quality on non-critical symptoms. This data will be made available through an open API to research facilities like hospitals and universities to facilitate their understanding of the impact of air pollution.


Resources Used

Hardware:

  • Arduino Uno
  • Intel Edison Board
  • Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F Dust Sensor
  • MQ-135 Gas Sensor
  • Temperature and Humidity Sensor

Software:

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

  • Azure Cognitive services: text analysis
  • Bing Location analysis
  • Twitter API

Frontend

  • jQuery
  • WebGL Earth
  • Bootstrap

Backend

  • django
  • Azure Virtual Machines
  • Sensor data analysis
Made inPasadena, CA USA
from the minds of
How they did it