What is it about?
We are a team in Geneva concerned with air quality in the city. We developed LogAir to make air pollution visible to all with the help of our partners of GeneveRoule.
We want everyone to help map dangerous particules in the air collaboratively and share the data openly, so we can all get useful information from it:
- For you to avoid exposure to harmful pollutants in your daily commute in the city,
- For non-governmental organizations to produce better advocacy campaigns,
- For policy-makers and municipalities to produce evidence-based decisions,
- For anyone to do whatever they imagine with it.
We have a prototype device that measures harmful particules in the aire (typical size between PM2.5 and PM10). The device can be attached to a bike and share the collected information using a smartphone.
We are asking you for support so we can produce our first batch of devices and distribute them to you and others in Geneva.
Why LogAir?
One of the most harmful pollutants in the air is very fine dust, usually called «particulate matter». It’s so small it can get through your lungs to your bloodstream, carrying a variety of harmful pollutants.
You may think air pollution isn’t a thing in a city like Geneva, but did you know that besides the 4.2 million deaths it causes annually worldwide (WHO, 2016), it’s also related to 1 in 7 premature deaths in Switzerland (European Environment Agency, 2016)?
The current way of assessing air pollution is through official (and very expensive) fixed stations. The spatial range in which they measure is limited to the area around the station. In the whole Canton of Geneva there are 4 of these stations, in the city only one.
What if sensors could move? Our project aims to complement the traditional approach with real time data generated by mobile devices, located where we think is relevant: around people. We already have preliminar data showing significant differences according to which routes you take to commute.
This is why we partnered with GeneveRoule, the biggest bikesharing service in Geneva, who will be attaching our devices to their bikesharing service bikes.
Our project received the Best Civic Initiative Award in Open Geneva’s AKKA Sustainable Mobility hackathon last June, and raised interest from Geneva public transport (TPG) and information agencies (SITG).
This is what we need backing for.
We need your support to produce our first batch of devices. This includes buying the hardware components, paying for pcb design, industrial design and software development.
Going into technical details:
We are using a particulate matter sensor from Plantower, a humidity and temperature sensor, GPS module, bluetooth module and STM32 microcontroller. The device can transmit the data through Bluetooth or LoRa communication. Your privacy is not at risk, as we never associate devices with phones, but with bike IDs.
This is a project you can actively take part in by building with us, analyzing data or even riding a bike to help us map air quality on the go!
