Wearable Infrastructure: Internet of Breaths (IoB) Combating Air Pollution
Yujie Wang and Adolphus Lau.
Discussed opportunities and challenges for wearables to be utilized for environmental management purposes and bottom-up urban planning
Journal of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners, Vol 34 (2020), 24-32. HKIP Planning and Development.
journal link: https://www.hkip.org.hk/en-hkipjournals-search/2020/10/20/volume-34-2020
Project “Internet of Breath“ exhibited at 2019 UABB Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture “Urban Interactions” exhibition “Eyes of the City” section.
Team: Yujie Wang, Yuxiang Zhang, Adolphus Lau, Dinglu Wang, Jiaxi Zhao, Jianan Ruan, Ziyuan Zhu
exhibition link: http://eyesofthecity.net/internet-of-breaths
Project Team: Yujie Wang, Yuxiang Zhang, Adolphus Lau, Dinglu Wang, Jiaxi Zhao, Jianan Ruan (Exhibition Collaborator: Ziyuan Zhu)
Keywords
Wearable Infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), Environmental Sensing, Air Quality
Excerpt
In the 2020 Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, an environmental management strategy, namely the Internet of Breaths (IoB) was introduced to increase cities’ capacity for resilience against air pollution. By infusing intelligence and data mining into everyday objects, the IoB leverages the power of real-time data to delineate an unambiguous picture of the critical socio-environmental issue. IoB sets out a holistic framework for the promulgation of smart objects and deep urban analytics to enable strategic planning of preventative measures against air pollution among other global environmental disasters.
IoB proposes an implementation mechanism comprising features of central coordination and citizen-driven actions. The two platforms form a feedback loop, which facilitates information exchange between the public and government institutions to assure mitigations are carried out with minimum delays and in a concerted manner. The two-fold system of IoB consists of a software package and hardware components. On the public user end, IoB relies on smart air masks and a mobile application to collect air quality data and distribute system information such as disaster alerts. The public administration end performs information management and analysis through a real-time IoT environmental sensing network, which collects and enables deep analytics on the data from mass sources. The two-fold system aims at combining bottom-up data collection and top-down environmental management, thereby enabling effective communications and information management.
Exhibited at 2019 UABB Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture “Urban Interactions” exhibition “Eyes of the City” section.
IoB Demo Video
A number of theories suggest healthy behaviour can be steered by guiding the decision-making process with cognitive prompts (Niedderer et al., 2016). IoB is strategically designed to prompt such behavioural change (Brown, 2009). The smart air mask is a detection, protection, and communication interface for the public users to measure ambient air conditions. The smart air mask’s built-in MQ135 sensor monitors real-time airborne contaminants and alerts the user to wear a mask when pollutant is detected. At the same time, the sound sensor in the mask connects brightness of the light to the sound of the user’s breath, creating a synesthesia of sound and vision, making the mask ‘a lighthouse in the smog’, warning people around of the pollution (see Exhibit 1). These design features, combined with the data architecture, foster an urban culture that citizens would gradually develop attention and knowledge to take protective actions against air pollution and public health.
