Taking Space

Join AirCasting at EcoHack NYC this weekend, 4/20 – 4/21.  I’ll be giving an ignite talk Friday night to rally contributors for Saturday’s Hackathon.  I’ve posted my ignite talk abstract below.

Much of what happens in our immediate environment and our bodies passes without note despite the positive contribution that recording and crowdsourcing these moments might have on our understanding of our health and the health of our communities. AirCasting is a platform for capturing this lost reality and returning it to us as useful, actionable data.  Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share sound levels from their phone microphone and temperature, humidity, and CO gas concentrations from a handheld Arduino-powered sensor package. 

At EcoHack we want to hack enviro-sense and bio-sense devices, plug them into the AirCasting platform, analyze the data to identify correspondences, and answer real world questions.  Is your noisy neighborhood disrupting your sleep?  Is your exercise heart rate elevated when the air is bad?  Do your blood oxygen levels drop when atmospheric CO levels are high? Potential hardware for hacking includes but is not limited to gas sensors, the Zeo electroencephalography head band, heart rate monitors, and pulse-oximeters.   

AirCasting is not-for-profit initiative. Our platform is open source and purpose built for crowdsourcing environmental health data.  Our team of contributors is diverse and includes environmentalists, engineers, scientists, educators, and designers.  Come hack with us!

On March 25th I flew down to North Carolina to share AirCasting at the “Apps & Sensors for Air Pollution” workshop hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The workshop took place at the EPA’s state of the art facility in Research Triangle Park where participants gathered to share their work building, testing, and visualizing data from low-cost, mobile air quality monitoring hardware. From remote control air quality monitoring helicopters to piezoelectric powered health monitoring bracelets to air quality eggs, it’s all covered here . . .

Michelle Gerboles from the European Commission – Joint Research Centre shared his work on “Micro-sensors for ambient air monitoring”. Standing out among the many projects he covered was his work measuring ship emissions using an “unmanned flying platform”.

Veena Misra from North Carolina State University presented her work on Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensor Technologies aka ASSIST. She described how body heat and motion might be used to power sensor bracelets that would continuously monitor an individual’s biology and environment and provide bio-feedback that could be acted upon in the moment to improve health. I wonder if one day these types of sensor packages will live inside our bodies, powered by our own glucose stores. Lose weight while monitoring your health!

Brian Beveridge from the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project presented the air quality monitoring his community group did in their residential neighborhood located next to the seventh largest port in the US. They used a range of different air quality monitoring devices including the Intel-Berkeley Common Sense badge.

Joe Saavedra from Parsons presented Citizen Sensor and the Air Quality Egg. Two exemplary citizen science projects that  prioritize public engagement as a core value.

Prabal Dutta from the University of Michigan presented a bird’s eye view of the evolution of  pervasive sensing systems and identified some of the opportunities that will emerge as these systems proliferate. He should know since he was one of the big brain’s behind the previously mentioned Common Sense badge and HiJack, a hardware/software platform for creating cubic-inch sensor peripherals for smartphones that harvest power and bandwidth from the headset jack.

Michael Hannigan from UC Boulder presented M-Pod and the Mobile Air Quality Sensing System. It’s amazing how many of us are working on handheld air monitoring units paired to Android smartphones. I’ve been talking with Ricardo Piedrahita, a grad student at Boulder who is working on the M-Pods, about flowing their data into the AirCasting platform.

Mike Taylor from Carnegie Melon unveiled the AirBot, a sub-$100 handheld particulate matter sensor. He also shared a phenomenal  graphing application that his team at the CM Robotics Institute created to display data on their bio-sense platform, BodyTrack. Unfortunately the BodyTrack website is not open yet but they created a nice Google map mashup using air quality data from AIRNow.gov that shows off their graphing software.

Jenny Quintana from San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health presented CitiSense, another citizen science project that utilizes handheld air monitoring units paired to a smartphone.

Have a look at AirCasting’s new and improved maps interface.  You can now perform a variety of targeted searches on the CrowdMap and Sessions map, permalink your map view, and share it with friends.

This scary map from Greenpeace maps U.S. chemical plants and their potential poison gas cloud fallout zones.  Like the EPA greenhouse gas map I blogged about a few weeks back, the Houston Ship Channel area has the densest concentration of facilities followed by the “chemical corridor” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  It would be great if this map was bigger and the facilities list generated by address searches generated a complete rather than a partial list of facilities.  There should also be a way to toggle off the fallout zones because they obscure the underlying map.

But mostly what this maps needs is a better explanation.  I’d like to know what types of chemicals pose the greatest threat and I’d like to know how often these types of accidents have happened in the U.S.  Growing up in Houston I remember hearing about an ammonia tanker truck that crashed at the intersection of the Southwest Freeway and the West Loop releasing a toxic cloud that killed seven people and led to the hospitalization of seventy-eight.

That white cloud in the distance is the toxic blanket of anhydrous ammonia fumes. (Texas Air Control Board/Houston Post file)

Clicking through the markers, I see lots of chlorine plants.  What is all this chlorine for, people’s pools?  According to the law firm Williams Kherker, which represents chlorine gas refinery workers who have been injured on the job, “Chlorine is commonly used in cleaning and sanitation efforts. It is found in drinking water and swimming pools, as well as being used in industrial settings such as oil refineries. Sulfur used in the oil refinement process creates a large amount of pollution, which is reduced when chlorine is added into the sulfur emissions.”

I recorded an AirCasting session yesterday that highlights the contrasts between the Gowanus and Park Slope neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods are close geographically speaking, the streetscapes are very different from one another as are the noise levels. To contextualize the sound level readings (and to show off one of our latest features) I attached notes and photos to my AirCasting session. Have a look: “Gowanus Canal to Prospect Park“.

AirCasting is an open source project. You can access the code repositories for the AirCasting Android app and the AirCasting web app through GitHub.  If you’d like to contribute just use the usual GitHub process – fork, make changes, and issue a pull request.

The EPA recently released an interactive online  greenhouse gas map that includes emissions data  for individual facilities. I’ve been following the evolution of the EPA’s mapping technologies for the last seven years and this is their most  impressive offering to date. The maps are served quickly, the user interface is mostly intuitive, and the data can be filtered and sorted before being displayed as a map, list, or graph.  It would be great if the map also included facility data on criteria and hazardous air pollutants.

I filtered the map to display all the refineries and chemical factories in the United States and as I suspected, my home town of Houston, or more accurately the Houston Ship Channel, is the epicenter. I also checked the geographic accuracy of the EPA’s facility data by comparing their map of New York City power plants to the map of power plants HabitatMap created in partnership with Sustainable South Bronx that identifies “peakers”. Unfortunately the EPA markers identifying the locations of the power plants is not very accurate.  It appears as though they gecoded the locations using addresses rather than latitude and longitude.

Version 1.1.2b of the AirCasting app, which was published to the Android Market this morning, is not working optimally. This version won’t allow AirCasters to create a profile, sign in, upload sessions or view the CrowdMap. We’ll be publishing a new version tomorrow morning that will fix all these issues. So if you downloaded this version please be sure to update your AirCasting app tomorrow. Don’t worry, when you update you won’t lose any of your previously recorded AirCasting sessions. The AirCasting website is also experiencing difficulties, it won’t display sessions. We’ll take of this tomorrow also. Thanks for your patience as we work out these early hiccups.

After taking time this weekend and yesterday to do more testing, we officially launched AirCasting today.  Below I’ve described a couple of my recent sessions to illustrate AirCasting in action.

Times Square to Central Park (click to view map)
What better way to start AirCasting then navigating between two New York City landmarks. As one would expect, the hustle and bustle of noisy Times Square slowly receded as I made my way up 7th Ave from 42nd St. (You can also see that the GPS had a difficult time locating me amongst all the skyscrapers.) Noise levels peaked again waiting to cross 57th Street’s four lanes of traffic. And living up to its reputation as a respite for a busy city, noise levels dropped almost immediately upon entering Central Park.

East Williamsburg Truck Routes (click to view map)
This part of East Williamsburg is plagued by a seemingly endless procession of trucks making their way up and down Grand St., Metropolitan Ave., and Vandervoort Ave. According to a recent Truck Study conducted by Organizations United for Trash Reduction and Equity, half these trucks are carrying waste. Not a surprise when you know this area handles nearly 40% of the 12 million plus tons of waste moving through waste transfer stations in New York City annually. Noise levels spiked as convoys of trucks made their way between stoplights. The loudest area was the Metropolitan Ave. Bridge, where the traffic from both Metropolitan and Grand merge. I ended my AirCasting session with a little peace and quiet as I crossed through the Williamsburg Houses.

Season’s Greetings from one of the hundreds of trucks that ply Metropolitan Ave. daily

Most sound level meters come equipped with a foam windscreen that fits over the top of the microphone, protecting it from wind interference. If you plan to use your phone mic for recording sound level readings, try crafting a windscreen to increase the accuracy of your readings.  I improvised a homemade windscreen by taking the foam covers off an old pair of headphones, rolling them up together, and jamming them between the phone mic and my plastic phone case. I “tested” the setup by holding my phone in front of a fan and the windshield proved effective, dropping around 10 decibels (dB) of wind interference. In comparison, the windscreens on my sound level meters were able to drop around 15 – 20 dB.  If you come up with a better method of protecting your phone mic from wind interference please email us at info@habitatmap.org.