Personalising pollution exposure estimates using wearable activity sensors

Abstract

In recent years several research groups, including ours, have demonstrated participatory systems that use wearable or vehicle-mounted portable units coupled with smartphones to crowdsource urban air pollution data from lay users. These systems have shown remarkable improvement in spatial granularity over government-operated monitoring systems, leading to better mapping and understanding of urban air pollution, at relatively low cost. In this paper we extend the paradigm to personalize the consumption of data by individuals. Specifically, we combine the pollution concentrations obtained from participatory systems with the individual's on-body activity monitors to estimate the personal inhalation dosage of air pollution. We show that the individual's activity, such as jogging, cycling, or driving, impacts their dosage, and develop an app that gives them this personalised information. Our system is a step towards enabling medical inferencing of the impact of air pollution on individual health.