Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Monitoring Air Pollution .. with an Umbrella?

Track Air Pollution With This Smart Umbrella (Carey Dunne, FastCoDesign, Jun. 26, 2014)

Also discussed here: Smart umbrellas keep you dry and check the air you breathe(Nicola Davis , the guardian, The Observer, Jun. 19, 2014)

And here: Track Air Pollution With This Smart Umbrella (FastCoDesign) And here: Share hyperlocal air pollution data with Sensing Umbrella (Zoe Romano, Arduino, Jul. 16, 2014)

And here: Sensing Umbrella (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Jun. 2014)

Today we note the innovative design of an umbrella that monitors carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, two of the main toxic air pollutants in many traffic-clogged cities. The idea which came from two students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design is intended for use by the larger public to both collect data easily and then have it automatically shared via Wi-Fi for potential application in mapping urban pollution or making pollution levels known in near real-time.

 sensing umbrella  

Key Quotes:

“The Sensing Umbrella with an Arduino Yún micro controller… measures local carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide pollution levels. As eye-catching as it is technologically advanced, the umbrella then visualizes this data in real-time through a sparkling LED light display on its surface. Firefly-like lights change their color and rhythm in response to local pollution levels, spreading awareness of the air quality to city dwellers."

“This timestamped and geolocated data gets uploaded to the Cloud (an unintentional metaphor) to pollution databases for scientific analysis…With multiple umbrellas around the city, we hope to generate local maps of air pollution”

 "We have a pretty sophisticated sensor inside that picks up nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide as well as temperature and humidity…We chose to focus on the pollutants because those were the things that were maybe less apparent to the average person."

“they hope to create a worldwide event, or movement, in which crowd-sourcing data via umbrella turns every person in society into a node in a larger network. So each person would gather and share information about pollution, for the greater good.”

No comments:

Post a Comment