Urban air pollution app goes live

Free Plume Air Report app for iPhone and Android provides hour by hour updates of where air pollution levels are highest

A new mobile app designed to predict air pollutant levels in major cities around the world has been unveiled by developer Plume Labs.

Plume Air Report app is designed for both Android and iPhones

The Plume Air Report, a free app devised for iPhone and Android, provides device users with ‘hour-by-hour’ updates on where and when air pollution levels are at their highest in urban areas.

It alerts users to trends in nitrogen dioxide, ozone and particulate matter levels and features personalized alerts and recommendations.

To power the app, Plume Labs developed the Plume Air Cloud, an environmental data platform which collects and aggregates information on air pollution.

The Cloud collects over half a million data points every day from more than 11,000 live air pollutant monitoring stations around the world, tracking pollution levels in 150 metropolitan areas in 20 countries.

A pilot app was trialled in Paris ahead of the 2015 UN Climate Change Summit in May, and has since received ‘tens of thousands of downloads’.

In select cities in the US, UK and EU, Plume developed AI and machine-learning algorithms that predict the hourly evolution of air pollution levels over 24 hours.

Since the start of its pilot phase, the app’s predictive technologies have reached “more than double” the accuracy of traditional forecasting methods, according to Plume.

Commenting on the app launch, Romain Lacombe, founder and chief executive of Plume Labs, said: “Plume strives to make the air we breathe more transparent. Air pollution is an invisible enemy, but we can fight back: actionable information helps limit our exposure, improve our health and well-being, and make our cities breathable.”

It follows the launch by former government minister Lord Paul Drayson last week of another phone app designed to measure air pollution on the move, as well as providing a rewards for the amount of ‘clean’ journeys users take (see airqualitynews.com story).