hackAIR

At present air pollution is one of the most significant factors posing threat to health worldwide. According to WHO outdoor air pollution was responsible for the deaths of some 3,7 million people under the age of 60 in 2012. One of the factors contributing to air pollution is atmospheric particulate matter (PM). Increased PM contributes to premature mortality, asthma, pulmonary infections, cardiovascular disease etc. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in 2013 that particulate matter is carcinogenic to humans. Particularly for air pollution, collective, rather than individual, action is necessary, as the air we breathe is a resource common to everybody, and any individual action taken helps the community. However, even though people are aware of the issue, and realise that e.g. that car emissions have an impact on air quality globally, they usually do not correlate their own individual behaviour with these outcomes. In order to preserve this unique natural resource for future generations, it is therefore important to raise the awareness of citizens on: • The levels of air pollution they are exposed to • The impact of their behaviour on air pollution • The measures they can take individually and as members of a community to reduce air pollution The HackAir project aims to create an open ecosysytem of user communities that will raise the awareness of citizens on air pollution. HackAir will develop and pilot test a toolkit that interested communities can use in order to collect, monitor, analyze, visualize air quality data and engage citizens leveraging the power of Online Social Networks, mobile apps, and gamification technologies. In particular, the HackAir toolkit will include the following elements: • an open-source web application framework for collecting, publishing and visualizing air pollution data (including both back-end APIs and front-end widgets) that each community can install and customise; • an open data ingestion module that will integrate existing public sources for air quality and integrate them in the HackAir database; • an open-source social media monitoring and mining framework for estimating particulate matter concentration through processing user-generated sky-depicting geotagged images, posted and made publicly available in social media; • an open specification and reference implementation of a portable air quality sensor that can be built at low cost and will be compliant to the open HackAir stack (including the mobile apps described below); • a reference open-source mobile app implementation (both in Android and iOS) that citizens can use to quickly get informed about local air quality indicators and to contribute to measurements by either connecting to a HackAir -compliant open sensor (via Bluetooth or USB) or by taking and uploading sky-depicting photos; • a portal for freely publishing and downloading the collected air quality data as open data sources. The HackAir platform will be tested in a real-life environment, engaging communities of interest. The communities participating in the pilot implementation of the project will build applications based on different combinations of components of the HackAir toolkit, depending on their specific needs. Multi-channel campaigns will be used in order to raise awareness about HackAir in selected local communities and enroll and engage users in the pilot activities and increase their motivation to participate. Furthermore, the platform will have tailored gamification features that will include specific rewards for motivating the participation of users (such as data contributor scores and badges, clean city leaderboards, local competitions for the best toolkit-based application, local competition for best new toolkit-compatible model, etc.)

Consortium

DRAXIS ENVIRONMENTAL S.A. (DRAXIS)
NORSK INSTITUTT FOR LUFTFORSKNING (NILU)
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES INSTITUTE
BUND FUR UMWELT UND NATURSCHUTZ DEUTSCHLAND EV (BUND)
VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL (VUB)
HERDING WIEBKE (ONSUB)