Team: Leapcraft
Leapcraft used CPH Sense (environmental sensors) on city buses in London, Aarhus and Santander for measuring air quality and emission levels in real-time to improve city planning, environmental policy-making and offer services for citizens to reduce their exposure to air pollution. “Breathable cities” experiment aimed to create a scalable solution to enhance transparency, fairness and compliance with air quality regulations.
The key members include: Vinay Venkatraman (CEO), Anne Cecilie Duus Kühnel (Operations Manager), Rohit Sharma (Creative Technologist), Vignes Krishnamoorthy (Engineering & Data Analyst), Christian Sonne (Software Developer), Emily Frimand (UX Engineer & Project Manager), Prima Mani (Design Researcher).
“Improving air quality is crucial to cities around the world. In our project we have been trying to gather measurements in movement. Succeeding with this would give a possibility of doing real-time measures covering a whole city with less devices. This could potentially improve air quality greatly.”
1. Relationships with bus companies were built for all three cities, then technical installation of sensors and displays for the bus were specified.
4. The real-time data was shown to citizens to receive their thoughts and feedback.
Graphs and heatmaps: We produced graphs and heatmaps to show an overview of the NO2 levels from sensors installed on buses in Aarhus. This city was expected to have normal pollution levels, however, we saw that measures exceeded the EU hourly regulations. This was also surprising to the citizens of Aarhus.
Sensors for measuring air quality: CPH Sense were mounted on buses to measure air quality while on the move, at various times and locations. They were mounted on the front of all buses to connect to the bus battery and avoid misleading measures from the exhaustion of the bus.
Disseminating our experiment: We have shared our experiences and impact of the experiment at various trade shows such as Smart City Expo in Barcelona, Utility Week in Amsterdam and Technomania in Herning.