AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
PRECISE: Personal Real-time Exposure Using Cell-phone Integrated Portable SamplErs
NARESH KUMAR, Ian Longley, Sung Kim, University of Miami
Abstract Number: 576 Working Group: Portable and Inexpensive Sensor Technology for Air Quality Monitoring
Abstract It is known that gene-environment interactions determine the final phenotype of different diseases. In personalized medicine, we have made great strides in characterizing the genotype of individuals, but we lack the ability to characterize and quantify personal environmental exposure. Recent revolution in smartphone and optical technologies offer unprecedented opportunity to develop inexpensive portable samplers. PRECISE is an example of this technology, which integrates portable sensors, cell-phone technology and high performance computing at web-server’s end. Portable sampler includes onboard (microcontroller) multiple optical sensors that record dust, CO, CO2, temperature, relative humidity, WiFi and storage card, and a cell-phone application that fetches data from sampler and transmit the data to our server in real time. The manufacturing cost of the instrument is < $500/unit and cell-phone application development is just one time investment. This is likely to pave the way for quantifying personal exposure to air pollution in real time, and monitoring and management of acute effects of air pollution.
There is strong positive association between dust from PRECISE and laser-based portable sensor, such as Aerocet 531, which is promising. Ten units of portable sensor will be deployed at several places at the University of Miami campus, classroom, dorms, library and student union. We plan to recruit students, who can install cell-phone application on their phones. The application will fetch data from the nearest sampler and warn student if at any place the concentration of CO and PM2.5 (converted using the dust, relative humidity and temperature from sampler) exceed the daily EPA’s thresholds. Successful completion of this work is likely to have important implications for real-time risk surveillance and management of respiratory and related diseases.