Can This Cheap, DIY Air Pollution Sensor Help the World Get Clean Air?

A several years ago, Alvaro Antonio Vanegas, a software package engineer and avid bike owner, obtained tired of the air pollution troubles in his hometown of Bogota, Columbia. He made a decision to join forces with an activist currently studying the issue, Daniel Bernal, who he’d read was creating his individual rudimentary air quality sensors and working with them to observe pollution at a regional stage. 

Functioning with each other, they tapped open supply software package and off-the-shelf components to build a new type of air quality observe. The gadgets empowered citizen experts to observe air quality with  cheap sensors tied to their Bluetooth-related cell phones and property WiFi alerts. 

They named their task CanAirIO, from the Spanish term for canary — the proverbial hen in the coal mine that tells you if the air is safe. 

And their product is currently encouraging democratize air pollution monitoring. It lets consumers document GPS places and particulate subject levels, which measure the liquid droplets and really little particles discovered in air. The size and quantity of these particles has been immediately connected to wellbeing troubles.

Most towns observe these working with just a several formal and high-priced air quality monitoring stations that measure really exact pollution levels at a choose team of sites. The monitors can price tag any where from $30,000 to as substantially as $100,000. Even some smaller, commercially-out there sensors can price tag hundreds of pounds. 

CanAirIO’s product can take a several hours to make and charges in between $50 and $100. For years, they’ve been educating citizen experts, which includes regional pupils, how to make and deploy the gadgets. 


Choose Component: Learn to Establish Your Possess Air Pollution Sensor by using SciStarter.org.


In the meantime, the CanAirIO team has methodically traveled all in excess of Bogota recording air quality and submitting the data on line for people to see. They pedaled their bikes down fast paced streets. They walked close to bus stations. And they rode general public buses together their routes. Eventually, CanAirIO even set up mounted sensors exterior people’s houses and at other stationary sites close to the metropolis. 

canairio students air pollution citizen science

CanAirIO’s team has labored with citizen experts and pupils during their neighborhood, teaching them to make and use the air pollution monitors. (Credit rating: CanAirIO)

‘The Odor of Diesel Smoke’

The facts helped the general public make a situation to the government for what they currently suspected was the culprit. Bogota has just one of the most robust bus devices in the entire world, relocating some two.4 million persons just about every working day. And but, even with these types of prevalent use of general public transportation, it’s nevertheless just one of the most polluted towns in Latin America.

Inhabitants blame the buses themselves, some of which have been in service for many years. 

“The buses emit substantial clouds of smoke due to absence of maintenance and working with the buses further than their handy everyday living of ten years,” Bernal states. “When you go on a bus, you detect the odor of diesel smoke. It’s terrible.” 

The situation is so undesirable that on a “No Automobile Day” earlier this 12 months, the metropolis experienced to challenge an air quality notify even as hundreds of thousands of people walked, rode bikes and traveled by using general public transportation.

In the end, CanAirIO’s air quality recordings showed what extra high-priced, conventional sensors did not. It caught regional-stage measurements of the air people were basically respiratory and showed the place the air was safe and the place it was not.

One particular of their largest discoveries was that the air quality though driving metropolis buses could be ten situations even worse than what they discovered in other pieces of the metropolis, like though crossing a windy pedestrian bridge. 

So, even on days when total air quality was viewed as safe, persons were nevertheless staying exposed to higher doses of black carbon and other damaging particulates as they went about their life.

Soon after quite a few years of adhere to-up citizen science research, their results were printed in the journal Atmospheric Natural environment in 2019. The facts backed up activists’ promises about the soiled metropolis buses and showed that the several more recent, clean up power buses in use were substantially safer.

canairio air pollution monitors

CanAirIO gadgets created and all set for action. (Credit rating: CanAirIO)

Citizen Science as Change Agent

As a consequence of escalating strain from people, regional officials were compelled to start off buying new buses. Nonetheless, there is nevertheless a simmering debate about how fast the latest metropolis government is relocating toward buses that use cleaner technology. 

And though their exertion started in Columbia, the team is now looking to provide this citizen science task close to the entire world to support other communities. 

Air pollution is the planet’s single major environmental wellbeing issue, in accordance to the Globe Overall health Firm (WHO). The combination of out of doors and indoor air pollution get rid of 7 million persons just about every 12 months. And WHO research clearly show that nine out of ten people breathe highly polluted air. That raises people’s threats of dying from a extensive range of results in. The even worse the air, the greater the threat of lung cancer, coronary heart condition, stroke and respiratory conditions. Researchers even suspect that air pollution may set persons at a greater threat of dying from COVID-19.

CanAirIO thinks their citizen science option can support fight the issue. By supplying persons the ability to observe their air quality levels, they can make extra informed conclusions about no matter if or not it’s safe to go exterior — or even if it truly is safe inside.  

This 7 days, Bernal, Vanegas, and other team associates gave a pair of on line tutorials, just one in English and just one in Spanish, walking persons via how to make CanAirIO’s air quality sensors. The occasions were hosted by Cos4Cloud, a European team that aims to provide citizen science into the continent’s open science landscape, and SciStarter, which connects citizen experts with the hundreds of initiatives accessible via its site.

How to Establish You Possess Air High-quality Sensor

Making the product is fairly uncomplicated for a person who’s excellent with their palms, but it’s also likely not for all people. The sensor involves some soldering to hook up the wires to the circuits. Nonetheless, working with the actual product is quick, the project’s leaders say. So, though moms and dads and instructors may need to have to support young children assemble the components, CanAirIO’s air quality sensors are currently staying applied in universities by pupils as young as twelve-years-aged.

And the product is remarkably exact. They analyzed their product by placing it in the very same location as a extra conventional, higher-priced sensor usually applied for academic analysis. CanAirIO carried out nicely, coming in shut to the extra high-priced instrument’s benefits, but without very the very same stage of precision. 

But that is also not genuinely the place of CanAirIO, the team states. The product is made to clearly show trends and tendencies, monitoring every day everyday living and creating significant amounts of handy data that citizens and plan makers can use to make every day conclusions. So, it’s not a precision instrument, but it’s nevertheless a highly effective device for measuring air quality. 

In the end, they’d like to make the product even extra usable. They’re performing on engineering an even smaller air quality observe that persons could even put on as they go about their every day life, recording facts on their commutes and close to their workplace.

“I consider the most critical factor is that you have air quality data in any position — in your property, on your bicycle, in your motor vehicle — that is very quick to understand,” Bernal states. 


Find extra citizen science initiatives at SciStarter.org.