CITIZENS

The project developed a citizen app called Pulsair. The objective of the app is to foster a healthy lifestyle and to make people more aware about the air pollution in the city. The app can be connected to FitBit, Garmin and Asus health tracker devices; the citizens can provide subjective data (from app questionnaire), physiological and activity data (from the wearable sensors) and localization data. The app provides information about the health risks (of asthma and type 2 diabetes) to the users and suggests specific behavioural modifications that are delivered through a specific logic of supportive feedback.

Furthermore, the app can show to the user the exposure to the air pollutants by combining the information of the position (the GPS data) with data coming from the environmental sensors located in the city that measure air pollutants (e.g. PM 2.5, CO, etc.). 

By using Pulsair, the citizen can also support the local public health planning because the shared data helps the public health organisations to perform comparative assessments across neighbourhoods and better understand the determinants of health across them. 

Pulsair is available in GooglePlay and AppStore.

More detailed information about the design approach can be found in the resources section consulting the scientific publication “Empowering Citizens through Perceptual Sensing of Urban Environmental and Health Data Following a Participative Citizen Science Approach”.