Air quality sensors on city buses

Rather than installing stations on fixed towers, why not use mobile sensors spread out over the whole city to get better air quality measurements? A project is studying the possibility of installing sensors on the roofs of buses and trams, thus taking advantage of already existing public transport and mobile phone networks. Testing is currently underway in Lausanne. Measuring air quality using mobile sensors installed on buses, trams and taxis: this is the clever idea being developed in the OpenSense project. Using the data from these sensors, a person with asthma would know what time of day the pollution was at its lowest in the neighborhood, and thus pick this moment do his or her shopping, for example. Parents would know where to take their children to play on a summer day, because they would be aware of zones with low ozone concentrations. This project, run by four laboratories at EPFL and one at ETH Zurich, is setting up a new infrastructure for measuring air quality that takes advantage of already existing networks, such as the public transport network. Mobile, secure, predictable, and spread out over a given area, buses are an ideal data collection base.