Air Patrol – smart health connected pigeons to monitoring pollution

This is Air Patrol: smart health connected pigeons that could soon invade the largest cities in the world since an air quality expert at King’s College London decided to use volatiles to detect pollution levels in the English capital.

Air Patrol is not the first initiative to use pigeons to detect air pollution in cities. Fifteen years ago, in Mexico City, 150 stray dogs were used to carry out almost similar measurements. Gary Fuller may also have taken some inspiration from the pigeons used by the German military for ehealth surveillance during the Second World War. But where does this surprising idea really come from? Well, this pigeon patrol is a creation of Plume Labs, a company specializing in air quality monitoring, and of DigitasLBi, a marketing agency.

It is therefore clear that these pigeons patrolling the skies of London are primarily intended to educate the public about the levels of pollution in the city. The pigeons are dressed in small backpacks, which look a bit like skirts, and in which are installed smart health connected pollution sensors.

If you are in London, you can tweet your location and receive a small air quality tweet in exchange for the area you are in. Sensors can measure nitrogen and dioxide levels produced by diesel vehicles, trucks and buses. The information collected is tweeted through the Twitter account @PigeonAir.

(Embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOLj862DTK0 (/ embed)

After the pigeons, the next phase of the project consists of recruiting human volunteers to carry out the measurements and integrate the Air Patrol. If you are interested and want to wear a small monitoring, you can subscribe here.

AB SMART HEALTH REVIEW