You’re out on your first jog in more than a week. You’ve been running for maybe a half hour when you’re suddenly overcome by a shortness of breath. Your chest feels strangely tight, and as you breath you emit an odd rasping, wheezing noise. Is it your fitness level that’s faltering, you wonder, or could there be some external reason your body is responding like this.
You pull up Google Maps on your smartwatch. Along with a dot showing your present location, there’s also some contextual information about your surroundings, revealing that you’ve run into a section of town where air pollution levels are excessively high. Another app, drawing on this information and your own health data, suggests that the air quality levels might be triggering your asthma. With a couple of taps of the wrist, you reconfigure Google Maps and plot a route that will take you home via some parks where clean air is in ready supply.
No, the above scenario isn’t currently possible, but it very well soon could be. For the past several years, a growing number of Google’s Street View cars have been doing more than just taking photos. They’ve also been measuring air quality. In the process, Google has been building a map of air quality not just in different cities, or different neighborhoods, but on the “hyper-local” level of individual blocks or streets. Now it’s taking those efforts to the next level.
This is far more fine-grained data than the current fixed air quality monitoring stations dotted throughout each city. In New York City, for instance, there are just 17 monitoring stations for a city stretching 300 square miles. That may be useful data, but it is woefully inadequate when you consider that air pollution levels can vary drastically within a single block. With air pollution responsible for killing an estimated 55,000 people per year in the U.S. alone, and 3.3 million people globally, a better solution is needed.
IN THE BEGINNING
Several years after Street View went live, Google was approached by a nonprofit group called the Environmental Defense Fund. The group had an idea: What if Google was to use its Street View cars, with their 360-degree sensing technology and high-precision GPS, to not just gather data about the visible world, but also the invisible world? More specifically, what if the search giant agreed to kit out its cars with air quality sensors to record this information wherever it drove? The EDF had developed a proof-of-concept showing how this could work, but it had nowhere near the resources to scale such a solution.
The idea found its way onto the desk of Karin Tuxen-Bettman, program manager for a division of Google called Google Earth Outreach. Tuxen-Bettman was intrigued. She sought out help from a company called Aclima, which develops scientific sensors and a sensor-based air quality mapping platform. Then she agreed to carry out a localized test study in the city of Oakland, roughly an hour’s drive from Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
“For a whole year we drove [our Street Views cars there],” Tuxen-Bettman told Digital Trends. “We actually over-drove because we wanted to work out how much driving was necessary and whether our algorithms were robust.” It turned out that they were.
The test drive also allowed Aclima to test out its equipment over a long period of time. “[They] had to add temperature control mechanisms inside their mobile sensing nodes to make sure that the humidity and temperature control inside the box was regulated,” Tuxen-Bettman continued. “We knew how these sensors performed after one month on the road, but what about six months? We didn’t want to have to bring these cars back every night or every week.”
Since then, Google’s Project Air View — as it became known — expanded. First it set its sights on the rest of California. Now it’s moved overseas, covering cities like London in the U.K. and Copenhagen in the Netherlands. “We’ve gone very slowly, because air quality measurement is a difficult field,” Tuxen-Bettman said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing it right.”
Wherever they go, the company’s sensor-equipped cars take multiple readings of the air quality in each location. Air samples are gathered via an intake tube on the vehicles’ front bumper, which filters through to an analysis unit in the trunk. This data is then sent to the Google Cloud where it analyzed and integrated into an increasingly giant and detailed map.
GOOGLE LIKES BIG CHALLENGES
“I think Google really likes these big challenges,” Tuxen-Bettman said. “Air quality is a huge challenge, and it’s one that’s not going away for quite some time.”
Project Air View fits into Google’s overall mission statement in a couple of ways. The first, the geeky engineering explanation, is that it’s part of Google’s dream of helping“organize the world’s information and [making] it universally accessible.”
Like latter day Francis Galtons (minus the problematic interest in eugenics), Google wants to measure, sort, and filter. Galton created air-pressure maps and beauty maps. He set out to establish objective measures of boredom and the efficacy of prayer. Google, for its part, wants to use geolocation to create a personal record of everywhere users have ever been. It wants to create order out of the chaos of unstructured web pages and images. And it wants to build the most complex, accurate map ever created in human history — and why wouldn’t air quality be a part of that?
One day, although not yet, the hope is that Project Air View data will be baked into Google’s various software offerings. “It’s not incorporated into our products yet, but we hope that in the future people will be able to go to Google Maps and Google Earth and see the finished product,” Tuxen-Bettman said.
Just as exciting is the possibility of other apps drawing on this data, correlating it with user health metrics, to make interesting (and potentially life-changing) connections. “We are not creating wearable sensors, but there are companies out there which are creating them,” Tuxen-Bettman said. “You could envision them using data like this, and other data, to do [interesting things.]”
The potential of this has already been highlighted in a study involving Google’s air quality data from Oakland. Published in the journal Environmental Health, the study combined the street-level data with six years of electronic health records from more than 40,000 local residents. It concluded that those who lived in areas with higher levels of air pollution were significantly more likely to suffer from heart disease. Going forward, it is possible to imagine similar correlations and recommendations being made for both communities and individuals.
“What we want to make it easy to do is to combine this data, take it out and [let people insert it into other] systems to really understand the health impacts,” Tuxen-Bettman said.
Google’s Street View cars are helping build a giant map of global air pollution [Digital Trends]