An index for reporting daily air quality. It reports a number, between 0 and 500 to reflect how clean (low AQI) or polluted (high AQI) the air is, and what associated health effects might be of concern to citizens. The AQI focuses on health effects people may experience within a few hours or days after breathing polluted air. AQI is measured for five major air pollutants: ground-level ozone, particle pollution (also known as particulate matter), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. For each of these pollutants.
Published in Chapter:
Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism
Eric Paulos (Intel Research Berkeley, USA), RJ Honicky (University of California, Berkeley, USA), and Ben Hooker (Intel Research Berkeley, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-152-0.ch028
Abstract
In this chapter, we present an important new shift in mobile phone usage—from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” We explore how these new “personal instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most to them. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a working hardware system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community—empowering people to become true change agents.