Enabling street-level pollution and exposure measures: A human-centric approach

In the last several years the awareness about pollution levels and other natural hazards has risen significantly. Millions of citizens globally pay daily attention to air quality and other factors such as for instance UV index and pollens. This new need has been so far met by a plethora of smartphone applications that leverage data collected by the city-operated stations or, in some cases, community-based stations located at the user premises. In this work we exploit recent advances in micro-controllers and sensing technologies to design and implement a personal pollution awareness system tiny enough to be embedded into user accessories. In particular, we will introduce the concept and the architecture of our prototype and show the preliminary results we collected using this prototype.