Event details
The
Centre for Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems is organising a seminar on "Crowdsourced Air Pollution Monitoring in Ho Chi Minh City-Vietnam with Low Cost Mobile Sensors" from Dr Long Tran-Thanh. The event is open to anyone from across the University to attend.
Air pollution is well known to have significant negative impact on public health, especially in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, where the air pollution level is one of the worst in the world. Despite the need for detailed air pollution monitoring, and thus better understanding of air pollution dynamics, very little air pollution data has been collected since 2009 in HCMC. The only two working air pollution monitoring stations are the one maintained by the US Embassy, and another one run by the National University for educational purposes (the latter typically does not work for months per year due to maintenance reasons). However, both stations can only provide aggregated pollution data, and not with the required details (e.g., ground level air pollutant percentage, collected in real-time, or at least with high frequency). Since the cost of deploying additional monitoring stations, that together can provide the sufficient level of data collection, is prohibitively expensive (one such station’s deployment and maintenance cost can go up to £100K), there is a need to implement a more cost efficient solution to the air pollution monitoring problem. In this project we propose a new approach which combines low cost sensor technology with crowdsourcing techniques to monitor the air pollution within HCMC. In particular, we aim to set up a proof of concept collaborative project between Southampton and the Vietnamese-German University (VGU), which aims to (i) build low cost sensors that are suitable for measuring a number of key air pollutants, which will be mounted to motorbikes, cars, and buses to collect data; and (ii) develop incentive engineering mechanisms to motivate local residents to participate in the crowdsourced data collection process. In this talk, I will provide a progress report of the project (i.e., what we have achieved so far, and what still needs to be done).