JUMO

Reduce air pollution exposure in urban areas

WHO data show that almost all of the global population (99%) breathe air that exceeds WHO guideline limits and contains high levels of pollutants, with low- and middle-income countries suffering from the highest exposures. source:who.int

Most common air-pollution sources involve combustion, while harmful on large scale CO2 emissions are not significant health risk to humans directly. After all, our own bodies to produce CO2. Unfortunately combustion processes are almost never 100% efficient and produce multitude of other chemicals and particulate matter (PM), these are shown to lead to adverse health outcomes.

PM emission are solids or liquid droplets that vary on diameter. Particles are divided to under 10 micrometers (PM10) and under 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), cutoff is set to 10 micrometers because that is the largest particle size that is able to enter lungs reliably. The second cutoff 2.5 micrometers is for particles that are especially harmful due to their more efficient transport to lungs and eventually absorption to bloodstream. Acute adverse effects by PM emissions are localized in lungs: asthma, COPD and other lung diseases, PM2.5 is also able to enter bloodstream and cause systemic inflation leading to increase in cardiovascular disease risk. Chronic inflammation localized in lungs, if untreated, can increase cardiovascular disease risk. Chronic exposure to PM emissions is shown to cause cancer.

Sources of PM emissions usually combustion processes, car and truck engines themselves nowadays have PM emission limits and thus produce them significantly less. However, transportation itself involves creation and dissipation of dust that contains PM10 and PM2.5 emissions. This makes high-traffic roads significant sources of PM pollution.

Internal combustion engines and many other combustion processes produce nitrogen oxides: NO2 and NOX emissions. Nitrogen oxides are shown to worsen pre-existing respiratory diseases such as asthma. When emitted to atmosphere nitrogen oxides produce mostly acidic compounds with further detrimental health effects. 

In total: repeated exposure to air-pollutants lead to increase in preventable disease burden, worsened quality of life and even premature death.

People with respiratory illnesses naturally ought to avoid exposure to air-pollution, however to mitigate long term risks, minimizing exposure to pollutants should be considered for everyone. Current navigation applications can take into account things aside the shortness of the route and the degree of traffic along the route, one that takes account the pollution exposure is yet to be developed. In this project we aim to create tool that would facilitate decisions regarding pollution exposure, such as route planning in navigation, traffic planning and even zoning.

What it will answer to: 

Challenges 1, 2 and 3.

1) Indoor air quality (Challenge 1)
Air filters keep us safe from outdoor pollutions when changed regularly. Manual status checks on these systems are expensive and some times neglected. Because we know the ventilation rate, we can calculate with satellite data when air filters need to be replaced. This improves indoor air quality and removes the need for costly manual check ups. 

2) Material harm reduction and noise pollution (Challenge 3)
Additionally we provide installable sensors on buildings that compliment our satellite data. Areal monitoring optimizes house maintanance: reduced a need to check house facades that taint with time from pollutions, chimney sweeping in scheduled correctly, ozone erodes insulating rubbers, detect bad odors. We can warn about outside fires on property like in garbage shed. Metering noise pollution as decibel pulses lets us gathers incident information. Actions like these can lower insurance costs. Property values can be increased with improved soundproofing when next renevation comes.

3) Fire rescue (Challenge 2)
Satellite data allows us to calculate the nature of fires from their emissions. Combined with building information we can know the stage of the fire and collabse risk. Smoke screens obstruct view and hide the exact location of fires. Informing rescue operations in real time even before they arrive will help extinguishing operation. Fire and burn kilogram of material in a second causing tons of toxic pollution to near by areas.

What data is used:

Copernicus' data and EGNOS height and air particle data and satellite data, and local data streams such as finnish air pollution data, Cassini spatial and temporary spatial data, weather data, open map data and LIDAR data and rakennuskanta data sets in different cities to smartly interpolate air pollution movements and sun ray location data and weather data.

References:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/topics/in-depth/air-pollution/eow-it-affects-our-health

https://publications.iarc.fr/Book-And-Report-Series/Iarc-Monographs-On-The-Identification-Of-Carcinogenic-Hazards-To-Humans/Outdoor-Air-Pollution-2015

10.1016/j.envint.2018.03.008