Yuktix® Technologies

Access to clean water and air should be our right as citizens. You can buy bottled water but you cannot buy pure air. Bad air is a health tax the society is forced to pay. (There was a Canadian company selling mountain air during Beijing crisis though!). The green activism around air quality suffers on two counts The problem that we have no data The problem that raw data is not action plan. We touched upon the first problem in a separate blog where we talked about the density of stations, improving coverage for a city and developing hybrid network models where sensors can be deployed in large numbers. Here we want to talk about the second problem, namely what to do with the air quality data. Kanpur is a city in North India that is synonymous with pollution. It used to be an industrial town and is famous for  leather tanneries.  Unfortunately there are few checks and balances in government and society re. the pollution. One drive along the stretch of Ganges near Unnao

"How do you get data for experiments"? I asked this question to one of the scientist working in an Agriculture institute. We do measurements twice a day, morning 8'0 clock and afternoon 2 pm, pat came the reply. Two data points for temperature and humidity. Wind speed is a counter and wind direction is inspected manually. This same data is used by researchers developing predictive models at their center. Then I made a suggestion. what if we automate the data collection process for not just above 4 variables but 10 and increase the data points to 300 per day? Now it was his turn to get excited. "It would be awesome! I can then focus more on developing models. I can as well do better modeling." This conversation fits the same pattern whenever I talk to researchers. The reasons can be easy to see. Recently, we came in touch with one of the scientists working in the environmental science field at Kerala University, Trivandrum. After our disc