SBIR Phase II: AQSync for Distributed Calibrations of Mobile Air Quality Sensing Platforms

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to enable a new paradigm for air pollution monitoring and mapping through the U.S. and globally. According to the World Health Organization, 4 million deaths per year globally are directly linked to ambient air pollution. Until now, the approach to monitoring of air pollutants has been limited to measurements at a few fixed-base stations spread throughout each U.S. state (e.g., ~30 in Colorado for a population of 6 million), and those stations are purposely located far from air pollution hot spots in order to obtain approximate averages. Recent advances in low-cost sensor technology has enabled new high-resolution mapping of air pollutants throughout cities and rural areas through vehicles of opportunity, such as those associated with ride share services and delivery vehicles, carrying small air quality sensor packages continuously uploading air pollution measurements to the web. The principal roadblock to this approach, addressed in this project, is a method to continuously verify the calibration of these mobile air quality sensors, inherently less accurate than traditional instruments. This SBIR Phase II project proposes to develop, test and evaluate a distributed calibration station, AQSync, to be mounted on lamp and traffic light posts throughout cities and towns to provide frequent distributed calibrations of vehicle-borne air quality sensor packages. A major challenge has been the development of relatively low-cost miniaturized instruments offering highly accurate measurements for inclusion in AQSync. This is particularly true for black carbon, believed to contribute substantially to up to 200,000 premature deaths each year in the U.S. through pollution-related health conditions such as asthma, stroke, heart disease and cancer. The development and commercialization of a Black Carbon Photometer in Phase I of this project represents a potentially disruptive technology facilitating measurements of black carbon directly in the gas phase, without the known artifacts associated with previous instruments and within a small footprint suitable for AQSync. This project addresses the next challenge of developing algorithms and demonstrating that implementation of distributed AQSync calibration stations enable accurate mobile sensor measurements to inform policy-makers, subsequently improving human health. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.