Smart City Air Monitor uses air quality sensor attaching to the vehicle to monitor the air quality through out the city. This idea originally came from Pigeon Air Patrol, where they use pigeon to monitor air quality in London. We believe that using our own cars would have much better results. A pubnub will be sending push notifications for those who enters the polluted areas. It would provide 3 major benefits
- For the drivers, they can now avoid heavily polluted areas and find alternative routes, it also allows them to monitor pollution during time of the day.
- The drivers now are also providing the air quality data to the city so that everyone else can plan their days around it.
- The city now knows where the most heavily polluted areas are, so that they can install air filters, trees, or simply signs to warn other citizens the general air quality around that area.
Using AT&T Starter Kit, we've built an IoT device which can be attached to the vehicle and monitors city's air quality, temperature, heat and humanity along with their coordinates through the Starter Kit, the information is then send to ATT Flow for transferring then to ATT M2X for data storage and analysis. The cellular connectivity will ensures the data uploading and the this entire unit will be powered by Solar so that user do not have to worry about power usage. The AT&T StarterKit code is being open sourced on github, and Flow designer is being open sourced as well.
The AT&T Starter Kit uses AT&T Flow to transfer data into M2X along with other devices. It provides both data transfer and authentication.
Mobile app (powered by PubNub for consumers)
A Mobile app is built (current demo is Android) is being used to inform the consumers about the air quality throughout the city. Right now the air quality data is per city, but not necessarily per street. With PubNub, user would be able to receive air pollution information during real time traffic as well as the upcoming trip. When they are stuck in traffic in a heavily polluted place, a push notification will be sent to help user decide whether to reroute.
PubNub will be used to help sending push notifications on the quality of the air in real time when it's really bad as well on the way to work, push notification is perfect way to catch user's attention and making rerouting decisions in real time. The Android is open sourced on github as well.
The M2X will provide the trigger via Flow for PubNub's actions.
Web app (for the city and speculators)
A web app is built for the city council and law makers to monitor the air quality of the city, this way we'd have information about the pollution in real time as well as throughout the day. The city can then decide actions on installing necessary air filters in the most heavily polluted areas to ensure health and safety of it's citizens. In the future, they can also deploy robots that can clean air to the affected areas, just like street cleaning car.
We've also integrated AT&T Drive and IBM Watson to help renavigate the routes which has less pollution, it is a different traffic rerouting mechanism that tends to avoid pollution instead of traffic.
Solar panel is intended to use as a way to power the AT&T Starter Kit, this way use does not have to worry about battery draining at any time.