Mobile Air Quality Monitoring and Web-Based Visualization

Abstract

This thesis presents the framework and implementation of a mobile air quality monitoring network, with an in-depth discussion of several new innovative techniques for web-based visualization. These techniques allow typical web users to access high-resolution pollution data gathered from a large number of vehicle-mounted mobile sensing devices coupled with highly-accurate static sensor data in an easy-to-use, intuitive interface. Additionally, this interface offers users a set of novel applications to promote health and pollution awareness, including a green trip planner, whereby users can plot routes between two locations based on a path of least exposure to specified pollutants, and an exposure estimator, which allows users to calculate previous levels of exposure to harmful pollutants based only on a single timed GPS track. The work described in this paper includes research on hardware aspects of the system pertaining to the mobile sensing nodes, communications structure and protocols, as well as software aspects pertaining to the implementation of the aforementioned flash-based web client.