Project to improve tracking of London’s air quality, led by The University of Warwick professor, is a breath of fresh air

A project between the Alan Turing Institute and Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, led by Dr Theo Damoulas from The University of Warwick, explores new ways to better model air quality in London. Since its launch in 2017, a revolution has happened in air quality monitoring. The project has launched interviews, research, played a role in conferences, and has even influenced a project in the Netherlands that fits bikes with air quality monitoring devices.

Air quality is currently measured by approximately one hundred monitoring stations across London. The project aims to ensure that data from these points can be brought together to a single place for analysis, enabling more effective air quality forecasting and modelling than is currently available.

Since each sensor is different, this isn’t an easy task, as data needs to be evaluated, accounting for different variables that affect its measurements, such as environment, frequency, and sensors degrading over time. The project has sought to create effective models for ‘de-noising’ techniques to reconstruct corrupted data, so researchers can establish the most effective places for future sensors.

Another goal is to accurately find low pollution routes for Londoners to follow when walking, cycling, or running through the city. So, alongside research, there will be the parallel development of APIs (application programming interfaces) and mobile apps to provide reliable, frequently updated, and highly localised air quality data and forecasts for people living and working in the city.

As of 2023, the next phase of the project is to combine machine-learning and AI to generate predictions for decision-makers, taking into consideration a variety of factors including health, income, and population. In the future, there is a chance that the API itself will be released to the public.