Towards crowd-sourced air quality and physical activity monitoring by a low-cost mobile platform

Abstract

Crowd-sourced air quality monitoring has been becoming popular in recent years for environmental surveillance and public health study. Most of such air quality monitoring programs merely invites volunteers to collect air quality data by portable or mobile air quality sensors. However, we assume it could be more interesting to measure a person’s physical activity intensity and his/her exposure to the air quality in a synchronized way in order to measure the air quality’s personalized impact on health, because different persons’ physical activities can differ in location, time, etc., and can be very individualized as well. To this end, during the 2014-2015 winter-spring season, we designed and implemented a low-cost mobile platform for recording air quality (both sensor data and subjective feeling data) and participants’ physical activity intensity. The developed platform is supposed to assist in future crowd-sourced environmental health studies. Data collection activities were arranged to prove the feasibility of the developed mobile platform. Over the data collected, preliminary analysis have been done identifying the correlations among air quality indicators, participants’ subjective feelings of air quality, physical activity status measured by wearable sensors, and reported health symptoms. The data collection operation and the data analysis results demonstrate the feasibility of the adopted methodology and the developed platform towards future user-centered, personalized, and crowd-sourced environmental health and health care studies.