What if you could visualize the air quality around you, in real-time, as you are traveling around London? You better believe it to be true!
Soon London will have an air pollution map available to those with smart phones in the city after utilizing CleanSpace Tags. Drayson Technologies, Inmarsat, and Gophr are coming together to introduce a way to collect data on air pollution.
Gophr bike couriers will be donned with Drayson’s CleanSpace Tags, sensors that will record pollution and send information to smart phones in order to create a database. The sensors are actually powered by wireless signals, which is pretty neat, given battery life would not be an issue.
Freevolt technology makes this possible, as it utilizes wasted energy found in wireless networks.
As the couriers cycle around the city, the collected data will be sent from multiple locations and bikes. The sensors are similar in size to a smart phone. So far, the tags feature a carbon monoxide and temperature sensor, Bluetooth Smart, Freevolt Harvester for GSM and WiFi, indoor and outdoor measurement capability, and LED notifications.
The data will be sent to an Air Map that can provide real-time pollution levels relative to location. To maintain the precision of the data, the couriers will also have Inmarsat LoRa trackers that record not just the location, but height of the courier itself. This data can be accessed through the CleanSpace mobile app.
Those with Air Map can make use of all this data, being that air pollution leads to 40,000 early deaths yearly in the UK.
Avoiding poor air quality would benefit short-term health benefits of the individual, but long-term benefits are unlikely to be affected. The air quality must be brought to a higher standard as priority, being that avoidance will not fix the existing pollution.
