Local Haze Release 1.3 Update — Share maps, new icons and bug fix
Local Haze
Air quality sensor confidence ratings delivered for free on your iPhone
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/local-haze/id1278998405
July 24, 2019
By: Karen Donoghue, PM/UX
Consumers are taking air quality (AQ) monitoring into their own hands, researching, purchasing, building and installing both indoor and outdoor stationary AQ sensors for their homes. A growing market of AQ sensors available to consumers offers more choices for outdoor air monitoring such as PurpleAir and Luftdaten while governments maintain a small number of high quality calibrated sensors for monitoring outdoor air quality.
Local Haze is a free iPhone app that allows consumers to crowdsource and assess the accuracy of local outdoor air quality measurements, delivering a sense of confidence about the data.
Local Haze aggregates crowdsourced air quality sensor data and delivers the data in an easy to understand mobile user experience. The app allows consumers to search for AQ sensors by geolocation and then to view sensor readings in detail. The app also shows sensor AQ as both a PM2.5 reading and a “Confidence rating” of the accuracy of the sensor data based on crowdsourced readings of sensors combined with analysis of government sensor data. The Confidence rating allows consumers to clearly understand the accuracy of their local AQ readings as compared to the sensors in the surrounding geographical area.
New Features in Release 1.3
Share Local Haze Maps to Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook and more
Local Haze has two new features to announce in this release (Version 1.3). First, we’ve added a new Share feature that allows Local Haze users to share a map anywhere in the world displaying the local air quality sensors for that geographic region.
Now users can share Local Haze maps to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Email and SMS or iMessage.
A 40% increase in the number of monitored AQ sensors
In this release the total number of sensors that Local Haze displays is now 14,213 worldwide as of today, which is a 40% increase since our last release six months ago in February 2019.
Bug fix for indoor Luftdaten sensors
A Local Haze user Tweeted that there was a bug in the app, so we focused on fixing it on this release. In Luftdaten’s web map indoor Luftdaten sensors are marked grey on their map, but they were not being filtered out in Local Haze. Local Haze focuses on outdoor air quality and has been ignoring indoor purple air sensors. In this release we have fixed this bug and Local Haze now filters out indoor Luftdaten sensors.
New sensor icons for Unhealthy and Hazardous AQ readings.
We have also updated Local Haze icon designs (above right) for Unhealthy and Hazardous sensor readings.
First product video for Local Haze
We created a first product video to explain the Local Haze app. The video is 20 seconds long and can be seen here on YouTube.
About Local Haze
Local Haze crowdsources and analyzes readings from a variety of outdoor air quality sensors to help users understand the air quality of the world around them. Local Haze reads AQ data from crowdsourced sensors from PurpleAir and Luftdaten and government sensors via AirNow and the U.S. Department of State.
Our goal is to deliver the best possible air quality confidence ratings for people using Local Haze. We are continuing to improve the user experience and the analytics around AQ sensor data to help people understand the air quality readings for the locations and gain a sense of confidence about the accuracy about their AQ sensor readings.
Local Haze is available for free on the Apple App Store (for iPhone) and can be installed here.
With this new release, Local Haze continues to help air quality enthusiasts be more confident about their local outdoor air quality readings by improving the quality of sensor accuracy through crowdsourcing.
The Local Haze team hopes you find this new release and enhancements useful and we welcome all feedback at localhaze@humanlogic.com.
Special Thanks
Thank you to Denki Jidousha for bringing the issue about the Local Haze failing to filter out indoor Luftdaten sensors in the sensors list.
Follow updates for Local Haze on Twitter at @localhaze.
Karen Donoghue is PM and UX Designer for Local Haze where she works on product features and UX collaborating with a team that includes design and engineering. For more info see https://www.humanlogic.com/localhaze/and you can download Local Haze for free by visiting the Apple App Store here.
