According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution is the main environmental risk to public health in the Americas. Exposure to important levels of this type of pollution increases the risk of respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. Therefore, it is important to know what the air quality is like where we pass. This was the thought when the team of four students led by teacher Pablo Hernandez created the CitySensor platform. The project is from Technical School No. 36, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and was the winner of the 10th edition of Solve for Tomorrow (Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay).
The students are between 17 and 19 years old and they are in the last year of the Informatics/Computer technical school (also the last year of compulsory schooling). Technical Education in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires has a First Cycle of the Professional Technical Modality with a duration of two years, common to all specialties, and a Second Cycle of specialties with a duration of four years.
The educator has decades of experience with technology and develops other projects in the school of innovation and environment.
I have a personal conviction that technology is going to be responsible for repairing the planet, declares Hernandez.
The teacher brought the concern to the classroom and together they began to think about the format of the platform and to plan how they could monitor the data from the city. The team’s choice, to work with air, was due to alarming statistics. For example, 15,000 Argentines die annually because of diseases caused by poor air quality, according to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Platform available to everyone
They planned the creation of a website with a real-time map of Buenos Aires, divided by neighborhoods. Each of the students was in charge of a specific task and the teacher acted as a mediator. David was in the production; Noah did the 3D design; Tomás was the Arduino and Hardware developer and Facundo was the Full-Stack Developer, the person who develops software (both for the part that runs on the server side, as well as in the user interface). “I seek to have more of a tutor role since they are students graduating and have advanced knowledge. They are the ones who have to take ownership and work on the project,” Hernandez believes.
The result was an intuitive and easy-to-navigate free website prototype. No technical knowledge is needed to understand the map — the idea is that anyone can do it. With one click on each neighborhood, it is possible to observe different parameters. The colors indicate how critical the air quality is in a specific area. In addition, the platform explains to the user what effects this contamination produces, what the risks and levels of contamination are, and how to act in each case.
Owned stations a thousand times cheaper
The project’s ambition was not limited to systematizing online data. That’s just the result. CitySensor has been working since the creation of some stations, which the city has installed, then connected to the network, and finally made available on the website.
The proposal to create stations of their own is not unprecedented, but in general, doing this is expensive. CitySensor has managed to discover much more viable alternatives. According to Hernandez, the team collaborated with researchers from the University of Buenos Aires, who have been working on a similar project for about 10 years to measure air quality. They have three functional sensors, but they have not managed to overcome the cost of producing the stations. With a lot of research from the entire team, CitySensor managed to develop devices a thousand times cheaper than the usual ones. “Our weather stations cost between 20 to 30 dollars. The others cost between 20 to 30 thousand dollars,” he reports.
With the help of university researchers and other electronics professors at school, they were able to produce a successful combination: the stations can be made on a 3D printer, using weather-resistant plastic. “In addition to that, its components are much cheaper than similar to other stations that were attempted to be manufactured commercially,” he details.
After the cost issue was resolved, other challenges arose. Since it was not possible to install the stations in public places, the team had to install them higher up, on rooftops, for example, where ideally, they would be at the average height at which people breathe.
The group still had to figure out how to connect all the sensors to the database available on the platform. “We were working and having many problems; some sensors reported poorly, others reported at the wrong time, and other times the graphics did not look good,” he says.
Selling the idea is key to growth
Throughout the challenge, the team grew in multiple ways. Beyond technical skills (web development, sensor utilization, and 3D design), they learned management and presentation techniques that allowed them to dream more clearly about the future. “Of course, we can give an effective communication talk to the students, but never at the level they achieved due to Solve for Tomorrow mentoring” emphasizes Hernandez.
The teacher highlights that the students learned project management, teamwork, and communication of ideas, thanks to the virtual workshops and mentoring. “They seem to be in their element; I mean, they made an exceptionally good presentation to the jury,” he says, proudly.
Expansion is the next goal
Now, the project plans to seek funding to take CitySensor on a large scale and be able to install the stations in the most suitable places for data collection. Maybe cover other cities and regions and start measuring water quality as well as air. “We have a fully functional developed platform so that we can almost instantly add new sensors to measure water quality, perhaps in strategic places in the city,” he hopes.
