Big shocker: The air in the New York City subway stations is nasty. Like, really really gross. “You’re breathing in diesel exhaust, steel particles, sulfur dioxide,” says Michael Heimbinder. “It’s well above the EPA’s standard.” You might have suspected this (have you been down there lately?), but Heimbinder has quantifiable proof.
As the founder of HabitatMap and AirCasting, Heimbinder has spent the last few years building an online platform for crowdsourcing environmental quality data. He and his team are at the tail end of a Kickstarter campaign for the AirBeam, a $200 piece of hardware that gathers information on the amount of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the air---one of the six air pollutants the EPA regulates. These tiny particles (produced from diesel car exhaust, coal burning, construction, and---I'm sorry---many pizza shops) are small enough to penetrate our lungs and find their way into our bloodstream. Yeah, scary stuff.
Since founding AirCasting in 2011, Heimbinder has been working to create a wearable instrument that would increase the amount of data collected and make it more accurate. Until this point, AirCasting has used a family of hacked-together third-party devices to measure air quality. This was a great start, but it didn’t produce the level of precision Heimbinder believes is necessary to paint a true picture of what our cities’ air looks like.
Heimbinder says the AirBeam, developed with Sonoma Technology and New York University’s School of Medicine, performs as well as instruments that cost 30 times as much. The little gadget draws in air through a sensing chamber, and a LED bulb scatters off the particles in the airstream. A detector registers the light scatter and estimates the number of particles in the air. This information is transmitted once every second to the AirCasting app (only on Android) via bluetooth and is graphed in real time. Areas with higher PM2.5 concentration are visualized as red, lower levels are yellow and green.
The immediate goal is to give people enough information to change their behavior. Long-term, having quantifiable proof of air quality will help reform policy and inform future decisions like how to best handle waste transport. “The low hanging fruit is to change behavior,” says Heimbinder. “It’s easy for someone to open their window [while cooking]; it’s hard to say we really shouldn't have recirculating hoods that pull up air from your stove top and vent it right into your face. It should really be vented outside, so now we have to change the building code. That’s a worthy initiative but obviously it takes more effort and more organizing.”
AirCasting is part of a growing trend focused on gathering ambient data about our urban spaces. We previously wrote about Chicago’s effort to embed sensors on its street corners in order to gather data on things like pedestrian movement, noise level and air quality. Other cities are following suit with their own initiatives, but more interesting is the idea that average citizens are willing to contribute to this influx of data themselves.
We're not at the point where wearable environmental sensors will be as popular as a FitBit---the accurate instruments tend to be too big and clunky at this point. But even if these sensors don't yet have mass appeal, they'll still expand the dataset beyond the limited number of sensors local government and grassroots organizations provide. Heimbinder says it’s like the Weather Channel acquiring Weather Underground to make use of citizen-captured weather data. “If we get that data and combine it with what we already have then we have a much more complete picture,” he says.
Ultimately, keeping the entire operation open source will lead to more people using AirCasting's data to build interesting third-party applications. Because while looking at raw data about air quality has its own importance, just imagine being able to fold this ambient atmospheric data into your personal health monitoring. Suddenly something like your Fitbit or Apple Watch has an added layer of context, which makes wearables a lot more interesting and a lot more useful.
