Poor air quality is a growing global health concern that impacts millions of people worldwide. Although we are beginning to understand the health impacts of air pollution, it remains a challenge to provide people with the information they need to be able to make health-conscious choices. The CitiSense system gives individuals the realtime tools they need to be able to identify when and where they are exposed to poor air. We present the results of a qualitative study regarding a 4-week "in the wild" deployment of the CitiSense air-quality sensor and system. We focus on how the 16 participants responded to their new-found information about their environment, how they shared information, and what kinds of actions were enabled by having access to real-time air-quality data. Quantitative data gathered through the course of the study frames participant responses by showing what levels of pollution were experienced and what activities heightened exposure. We found that CitiSense's real-time graphical displays and everywhere monitoring provided a critical bridge between data and experience, enabling sophisticated in-the-world sensemaking and sharing with those nearby. This in turn affected behavior and attitudes, leading to shifts in how users reasoned about their world, and how they assessed their personal choices and impact.
Environmental exposures are a critical component in the development of chronic conditions such as asthma and cancer. Yet, medical and public health practitioners typically must depend on sparse regional measurements of the environment that provide macro-scale summaries. Recent projects have begun to measure an individual's exposure to these factors, often utilizing bodyworn sensors and mobile phones to visualize the data. Such data, collected from many individuals and analyzed across an entire geographic region, holds the potential to revolutionize the practice of public health.We present CitiSense, a participatory air quality sensing system that bridges the gap between personal sensing and regional measurement to provide micro-level detail at a regional scale. In a user study of 16 commuters using CitiSense, measurements were found to vary significantly from those provided by official regional pollution monitoring stations. Moreover, applying geostatistical kriging techniques to our data allows CitiSense to infer a regional map that contains considerably greater detail than official regional summaries. These results suggest that the cumulative impact of many individuals using personal sensing devices may have an important role to play in the future of environmental measurement for public health.
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