Smell Pittsburgh: Community-Empowered Mobile Smell Reporting System
This addresses air pollution monitoring for communities lacking accessible tools, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled urban air pollution by developing Smell Pittsburgh, a mobile system that allows community members to report odors and visualize them with air quality data, resulting in a model that predicts smell events and helps identify local pollution patterns.
Urban air pollution has been linked to various human health considerations, including cardiopulmonary diseases. Communities who suffer from poor air quality often rely on experts to identify pollution sources due to the lack of accessible tools. Taking this into account, we developed Smell Pittsburgh, a system that enables community members to report odors and track where these odors are frequently concentrated. All smell report data are publicly accessible online. These reports are also sent to the local health department and visualized on a map along with air quality data from monitoring stations. This visualization provides a comprehensive overview of the local pollution landscape. Additionally, with these reports and air quality data, we developed a model to predict upcoming smell events and send push notifications to inform communities. Our evaluation of this system demonstrates that engaging residents in documenting their experiences with pollution odors can help identify local air pollution patterns, and can empower communities to advocate for better air quality.