Tracking people’s movement provides a deeper picture of exposure to pollution in urban settings (MIT)New York – Using Mobile-Phone Data to Understand Pollution in Urban Areas
The flow of people into parts of urban centers is aggregated with specific exposure levels? Smartphones can help to find an answer to this question.
Tracking people’s movement provides a deeper picture of exposure to pollution in urban settings (MIT)Air pollution in urban areas is commonly measured with fixed measuring points which are spread over the entire city. New York is one of these cities with an extensive monitoring network of 155 locations. On the other side, we are nearly to 100 percent trackable – with the smartphone in our pocket. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tried to use this smartphone data in order to receive new insights to provide a deeper picture of air pollution in urban areas.
According to the related study “Exposure Track—The Impact of Mobile-Device-Based Mobility Patterns on Quantifying Population Exposure to Air Pollution“, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, spatially- and temporally varying populations can be considered. With the tracked population dynamic and activity patterns, it is possible to evaluate the population-weighted exposure to air pollution on a city-wide scale. Allegedly, it is the first study using measured population activity patterns of several million people to quantify population-weighted exposure to air pollution in urban areas with the support of mobile phones.
The study states:
In investigating the temporal variability of the “Active” population-weighted exposures determined in districts, these were found to be significantly different (p < 0.05) during the daytime and the nighttime. Evaluating population exposure to air pollution using spatiotemporal population mobility patterns warrants consideration in future environmental epidemiological studies linking air quality and human health.
Three different maps of New York illustrate a comparison of approaches to measuring pollution exposure.
“The traditional way to look at pollution is to have a few measurement stations and use those to look at pollution levels,” says Carlo Ratti, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, where the study was conducted. “But that’s sensitive to where the [measuring] stations are. If you want to quantify exposure, you also need to know where people are.”
MIT News states:
Specifically, the flow of people into parts of midtown Manhattan, and some parts of Brooklyn and Queens close to Manhattan, appeared to increase aggregate exposure to PM in those areas. Meanwhile, the daytime movement of people away from Staten Island actually lowered overall exposure levels in that borough.
“Up to now, much of our understanding of the impact of air pollution on population health has been based on the relationship between air quality and mortality and/or morbidity rates, in a population which is assumed to be at their home location all the time,” says Marguerite Nyhan, a researcher at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the Senseable City Lab. “Accounting for the movements of people will improve our understanding of this relationship. The findings will be important for future population health assessments.”
121 days of data from April through July 2013 were examined by the scientists. According to MIT News, this method can be applied broadly for urban and environmental analysis.
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Monitoring is a useful thing, but is of little value if it is to be redone.
I think that many mayors cry crocodile tears, not having made any city or town in the world with a single small neighborhood prototype with sewers autodepurative of water and air together, connected to heat exchange towers, which would eliminate the external units of air conditioners, would filter the air and would exchange heat with the ground, while the chimneys with double walls would depurate fumes and would recover the CO2 and heavy gases with dust, creating a path Escape down to purify aerobically in vertical wells, with air polluted the water equally polluted. While the semi purified water would flow in existing sewers by alkalized mini greenhouses limestone, connected to purifying wells, the air, relieved by heavy gases and dust more or less subtle, instead would rise to the atmosphere through the wash that happen in greenhouses limestone, connected to the heat exchange towers over mentioned. The sludge extracted from the bottom of the wells, on the other hand would make a path anaerobic separated from the water, to produce biogas in the digester closer, which would not produce bad smells odors, being matched to the aerobic treatment of the sludge, while the liquid digestate, would be used to produce other biomass in biological overlapping ponds that produce even purified water, part of which would create artificial rain in other limestone greenhouses where the air extracted from the digesters themselves and from the biological heating station combined would be deodorized and impoverished of CO2. Of all this there is a comma in any city in the world because no one is fighting to have these. Protest with the powerful is useless, if you leave in their hands the arbitrary solutions. They continue to raise taxes and create mega purification plants far from cities that are useless, Indeed produce acidic waters that increase eutrophication and global warming, while the purification of urban air does not exist. You invoke the winds so air dispersion in the atmosphere: pain shared is a joy for all? In reality, urban smog and smoke are deposited everywhere, including glaciers, which obscured absorb more heat, while those that remain in the atmosphere produce acid rain producing desertification. These are the reasons why the current purifications are wrong. The global treatment should be incorporated into the environment avoiding at the origin of all process dispersion of polluting, as summarized above and illustrated in detail on the site web http://www.spawhe.eu. But of this we can not speak freely with the experts that are simple employees, who have to obey the employers. In discussions on Linkedin easily, it comes off topic if you talk about global purification, prefer to speak only of new energy to pull water to their mill. On facebook, on the other hand, there is greater freedom of expression, but no one is really interested in solutions. Nevertheless the global purification, as well as being the only efficient solution for the protection of the environment is also one that could lead to increased employment, all being redone.