Clairity: connecting through air quaility montioring

description

Air quality is an inherently important aspect of both personal and environmental health. This is a problem that many Canadians struggle with due to proximity of industry to residential areas. The thesis of this project focuses on a community in Ontario, but other cities like Vancouver as well as communities near the tar sands could also benefit from this system. Ontario communities Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia are next door neighbours to Chemical Valley, Canada’s largest refinery of petrochemical products (MacDonald, and Rang).  Health effects on the community have been dire; girls are born at double the rate of boys, there is a high rate of asbestos related disease,  and about 40% of community members require an inhaler (MacDonald, and Rang). The First Nations community of Aamjiwnaang was hit the hardest due their immediate proximity to Chemical Valley. Residents had started monitoring their own air quality after noticing numerous leaks that companies were slow to report to the public. The residents were trying to regain control of their air quality by taking air samples through a vacuum system and sending them to California at a cost of $500 per test and a two week wait (McGuire). After speaking with Aamjiwnaang’s community run environmental group as well as accessing reports from their stationary air quality monitoring system, it became apparent that there was a need for a mobile air quality monitoring system and new connections between other air quality stations in the area. It also became apparent that existing data from these stations was being presented in an inaccessible way, through hard to read charts and graphs. Thus, this project would be tackled from a systems approach and broken up into into three main topics: data collection, data management, and data connection. This system is still in the early stages of testing. Over the upcoming months, both the wearable and interactive aspects of this system will be refined through more user testing and further prototyping. Other aspects like the working sensors and increased access to data need to be addressed, possibly drawing on other systems already in place. A plan for implementation needs to be flushed out to allow this concept to become a reality, and to provide access to the information that individuals need to understand and protect their health and the environment.