Wearing an Air Sensor for a Week

Wear an Air Sensor for a week - you’ll learn something. Here's what I learned.

The experiment: Carry an air sensor for 1 week and learn about my environment, the AirBeam, and the future of personal air quality measurements.

Setup:

Source: AirBeam

• AirBeam to measure PM_2.5
• Cellphone to record the data
• Python/pandas programs to process the data
• Initial-State IoT platform to view the data
• Ask 3 questions to learn something
  • Where were the highest values measured?
  • What was my exposure to particles?
  • What it's like to carry an air sensor for a week?

Some stats:

• Collected data from July 23-29, 2017 (7 days, 12 hrs, 9 min, 14 seconds)
• Most time spent indoors (89.9%)
• Collected over 1.9 million data points collected
• Highest pollution levels cooking (at restaurant and friends house)
• Average pollution by location and activity (table)
• Location, activity, max, average, AQI category
  • Average by day
  • Average by hour
  • Map of data

The Results…

Question 1: Where were the highest values measured?

• It was a good air quality week (Good to Moderate on the AQI scale)
• The average of all the data was 9.1 ug/m³
• Time spent at various AQI levels:

Question 2: What was my exposure to particles? To calculate my exposure to particles, I identified my time and activity during the week. Each activity was related to an inhalation rate (based on EPA guidelines). Next, data dose was computed using the concentration and inhalation rates. The following table shows some summary statistics. I spent 93.9% of my week+ in good or moderate AQI air, and time spent in unhealthy for sensitive groups or worse air quality was 6.1%.

Question 3: What it's like to carry an air sensor for a week?

• This produced a lot of data - took hours to wrangle and process
• There is not good way to show this data
• Carrying the AirBeam became a chore by the 5-6th day
• Need a way auto detect environmental changes

A couple of things to remember. Air quality is highly variable by location, time of day, day of week, season, and weather conditions. One person’s experience will be very different than others. Also, there are 100’s of air pollutants in our air and the AirBeam measures an important one (PM_2.5).

Bottom line: AirBeam is easy to use. It produces lots of data (1.9 million data points), which take lots of analysis to tell the story. Want to talk or learn more about this?