The team at HabitMap wants to help solve the problem of air pollution. Based in Brooklyn the group is concerned with the tiny particulate matter that is breathed in every day. Dust, soot and smoke contribute to asthma, bronchitis, cancer and heart disease. Air quality monitors run by the government are expensive and aren’t able to cover all of the world.
HabitMap has run through six iterations of prototypes and three years of development to bring AirBeam to life and is running a Kickstarter funding campaign until November 19, 2014. AirBeam will accurately input the air that a user is breathing, analyze it and upload the data so that everyone can see air quality in real time.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/741031201/airbeam-share-and-improve-your-air
AirBeam is powered by an Arduino board and currently works with the AirCasting app on Android. Using a light scattering method the device measures PM2.5, particles that are less than 2.5 microns in diameter. Air enters a sensing chamber where an LED lightsource scatters the particles into a detector – that scatter is measured and converted into an air particle measurement.
The AirBeam is one of several devices that the group has developed, including the AirCasting Air Monitor and the AirCasting Luminescent Vest. The LiteBeam is an amazing accessory that uses a 3d printed shell to house a sensor system, glowing red yellow or green based on air quality in the immediate area.
I’m a sucker for large scale open source projects like this, and giving the power to ‘citizen scientists’ like this to report their local data is great. The AirCasting app has been downloaded over 10,000 times and thousands of users are currently intaking and transmitting data.
A large group of high school students are already involved with the project through the AirCasting youth curriculum. Most current users have built their own monitors, and the funds from this campaign will allow HabitMap to mass produce devices to distribute to even more users.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/741031201/airbeam-share-and-improve-your-air