Using sensor technology to respond to a growing problem in our city

Pollution in Medellin is growing. Our team is tinkering with a solution.

Cityscape and Mountains with sky and clouds in Medellin, Colombia. Photo by Julianza.

Like many cities, Medellin, Colombia has a serious air pollution problem. Located in the middle of a valley, the surrounding mountains prevent the dispersion of harmful pollutants. Since 2005, the number of cars in the city has doubled and the number of motorcycles has grown more than five times. All of this has resulted in contamination measured at more than twice normal levels — a problem that only worsens during periods of extreme heat and drought. According to a study by epidemiologist Elkin Martinez, 3,000 people died of causes related to air pollution last year — equivalent to one person every three hours.

I live in Medellin. Like most people, my family and I like to spend time together outside. When the city declared several air alerts last year, our family became aware of how serious this problem had become. Unfortunately, the government air quality sensors do not give the residents of Medellin a way to track levels of pollution in our city with enough detail. Three sensors measure pollution levels for the second largest city in Colombia.

As a software engineer with a Master’s degree in Information Technology, and a passion for tinkering on hardware projects, I teamed up with some of my co-workers at Matter Supply and we dove into the problem. We decided the best thing we could do would be to create our own air quality sensors. We set out to build a full platform, including sensor devices, a server, and a web and native app. This group of technologies would allow us to gather air quality data and to share it with the general public. In doing so, we hope to encourage the government to take meaningful action to address this growing problem.

To get started we worked on four different areas that built on the strengths and expertise of our team.

1. Build a device with sensors that reads the dust density and sends that data to a Raspberry Pi which in turn sends it to a server.
2. Set up a server that receives that data from all these devices and stores it in a database as well as makes it available through APIs.
3. Create a Web App that displays dust density at different locations on a map, giving people the ability to track pollution by area.
4. Build an iOS app that allows others to setup devices with details such as WiFi settings, or the device geolocation, and allows you to read data in real time.

Last month we held a hackathon over a Saturday to begin creating these pieces. We identified a number of technical challenges and to-dos, but we also made a lot of progress. Our intention is to treat this as an open source project and to document the technical specifications so others can add to our work and build their own sensors. An article detailing the final build will soon be released to that end. We also intend to find sponsors who can help others access the tools and components needed to build more sensors, so we can build a powerful and enduring network.

Our hope with this project is to inspire others to realize that important challenges, even those that seem too big or intractable, offer us all a way to get involved. By using our skills and creativity and by teaming up with like minded people, we can at least start working on these problems. Hopefully our work can then influence larger institutions to put their significant resources into solving them.

Edgard Aguirre is a Partner at Matter Supply, a strategy, technology, and design studio specializing in emerging technologies.