Android App Uses Cellphone Camera to Measure Air Pollution

If you think there’s something in the air, you could know for sure by just pointing your Android phone at it.

An Android app called Visibility, developed by researchers at University of Southern California, lets users take a photo of the sky and get data on the air quality.

The free app is currently available for phones running Android 2.1 version of the operating system.

“Airborne particulate matter is a serious threat to both our health and the environment,” say the researchers on their blog. “We are working towards an optical technique to measure air visibility, and hence an estimate of some kinds of air pollution, using cameras and other sensors available on smartphones.”

It’s a neat idea and it’s interesting to see how smartphones are giving rise to the trend of citizen science and crowdsourced data.

As smartphones become ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, researchers are increasingly using the devices to do complex computations and use it for crowdsourced data gathering. For instance, as part of a project called ‘Common Sense’ Intel’s research labs developed sensors that could be attached to GPS-enabled phones and measure air quality.� The data gathered from these sensors would be brought back and processed to help researchers understand pollution levels.

The Visibility Android app hopes to offer something similar but make the process more user friendly.

With the Visibility app, each user photo of the sky is tagged with location, orientation and time. The data is transferred to a server where the calculations take place. The level of air quality is estimated by calibrating the images sent and comparing their intensity against an existing model of luminance in the sky, say the researchers.

The result is sent back to the user and the data is also used to create pollution maps for the region. An iPhone version of the app is in the works.

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