UrbanBREATH

Public awareness to assess and improve performance of urban infrastructure

About

Funded in the framework of the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership (DUT Call 2024), the UrbanBREATH is an interdisciplinary project focused on measuring, modeling and mitigating air pollution in urban environments. We combine low-cost sensing, community engagement and data-driven policy recommendations to create healthier cities.


Ensuring clean air is a critical component of urban ecosystems, as urban air quality significantly impacts the health of city residents and surrounding wildlife. This project aims to develop and provide deployment strategies for air quality monitoring system based on different urban stakeholders (residents, landlords, infrastructure owners, utility companies, recycling companies). The main focus of the project is on monitoring and decision-making based on ventilation systems for the corresponding stakeholders. The UrbanBREATH project is to provide integrated IoT-based monitoring solution to assess specifics of each of the stakeholders. The research hypothesis is that the performance of each of the stakeholders can be derived based on evaluation of the air quality and there exists intelligent automation strategies allowing for optimization of air quality with simultaneous reduction of energy consumption and carbon footprint of buildings. The project shall allow citizen science to derive and demand potential changes in the community based on unsatisfactory air quality.


UrbanBREATH Icon

Objectives

  • Enable deployment of a dense network of low-cost air quality sensors to capture fine-grained spatial data.
  • Develop open-source tools for real-time air quality-based environmental data processing and visualization.
  • Engage local communities and policymakers with actionable insights.
  • Evaluate interventions and support evidence-based urban planning.

UrbanBREATH tech pillars

Consortium

NTNU
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway — coordination, IoT and Semantic web (project coordinator for project-related inquaries: Andrei Lobov).
Naukatek
Naukatek AS, Trondheim, Norway — use case provider; Manufacturer of high-quality meltblown non-woven materials.
TalTech
Virumaa Innovation Centre of Digitalization and Green Technologies, TalTech Virumaa College, Kohtla-Järve, Estonia — ICT, ventilation systems, green energy, and use case provider.
Skat-Keskus
Skat-Keskus AS, Narva, Estonia — key public service provider; utility systems.
LTU

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