Environmentally conscious? The TZOA Pollution Monitor might interest you. It’s a wearable device that detects air pollution, an environmental issue that plagues many modern cities. It’s simple: “A fan directly beneath TZOA’s triangular cover sucks in air. As pollutants cross a laser, they scatter light onto a sensor that counts them. TZOA then glows a color corresponding to the air safety level. A smartphone app also displays that data, along with daily UV light exposure and crowdsourced pollution maps.”
“Journeyman electrician Kevin R. Hart and nurse Laura Moe, the inventors, are the type of people who attend Environmental Protection Agency events for fun. They’re also the type who leave an event, as they did in 2013, determined to help solve the planet’s single largest environmental health risk: air pollution. Most cities rely on just a handful of expensive air monitors to detect hazardous pollution levels. Hart and Moe decided to build a wearable device that collects data everywhere a person goes.
After planning out how the sensor would work, the pair turned to the resources at MakerLabs, a community workspace in their native Vancouver, British Columbia, for further development. The size of an Oreo cookie, the sensor measures particulate matter, a key air pollution component, as well as ultraviolet light.”
To read more about this invention, which was another 2015 winner of Popular Science’s Invention Awards, click here.
This blog post was adapted from and directly taken from: http://www.popsci.com/wearable-pollution-monitor
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