A geospatial data intelligence start-up, founded by an IIT alum, has launched a mobile app, BreeZo that can provide real-time information on air pollution across India free of cost. The app, developed by Blue Sky Analytics, provides real-time air pollution data at 200 locations across the country.
The app also provides historical data on air quality from the year 2006 onwards from all pollution control boards in India which will help users to analyse air quality data.
Besides this, the users will also get daily notifications for good air days and bad air days and recommendations for what can be done to reduce exposure to air pollution. Chatbots on WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are also available for quick access to air quality information.
To ensure that the data is accurate, the app uses data available from satellite monitoring systems and sensors across the country. Kshitij Purwar, chief technical officer, Blue Sky Analytics, said “Our vision is to build the world’s largest spatially and temporally continuous dataset on key environmental parameters and transform the monitoring, diligence, and risk assessment systems in India and globally.”
Purwar said BreeZo provides all of the information on air quality at a single glance. It shows historical data and changes in air quality across space and time through interactive graphs and visuals which give the user greater information about the changes in the air around them.
Users will also be able to determine cleaner air routes, when to go outside and what areas to avoid at certain times. Abhilasha Purwar, chief executive officer, Blue Sky Analytics said, “Blue Sky provides the environmental data, starting with air in 2019, water in 2020, and land and heat in 2021, by crunching large volumes of data sets from satellites and various internet of things (IoT) devices, processing them through our proprietary machine learning algorithms.”