During the Summit, Digital Pioneers will present their projects and ideas every hour in the Hall of Trouw Amsterdam. On Thursday 28 October 16.15 hrs Johannes la Poutré will tell us all about measuring air quality and his experiences as a Digital Pioneer. We interviewed Johannes shortly about himself and the project MIMAQ, which stands for mobile individual measurements of air quality…

- Please tell us a little about yourself…
“Hi, I’m Johannes la Poutré. I’m intrigued by new inventions and ways to combine and extend them. From that perspective I got involved with the Internet in the early days and kept following its newest developments closely. Today this brings me in the field of Augmented Reality where I’m working now for TABworldmedia.com”.

- How and why did you start MIMAQ?
“Last December the International Climate Summit was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. For that occasion a group of volunteers teamed up to create a proof of concept: the Copenhagen Layer, where local air quality was measured ad visualized in augmented reality. The MIMAQ project takes this concept to the next level, focusing on the measurement of air pollution on a very personal and hyper-local level. User participation is encouraged by recruiting volunteers and asking for their personal opinion and feedback. We hope to refine the measurement network so it can provide real time data complimentary to the expensive measurement stations which are currently deployed”.

- What can we do with MIMAQ?
“Volunteers do continuous measurements during their outdoor activities and get an idea of their exposure to air pollution. Others who are in the same local area are able to see the last pollution levels around them on their smart phone in augmented reality, or on a map from everywhere. This way you get an idea how clean (or bad polluted!) your daily commute, your running training round or any outdoor activity really is”.

- How does MIMAQ stimulates social innovation?
“Using MIMAQ, participants and observers get the tools to verify the official statistics of air pollution for their area. The project also creates awareness of the invisible, local air quality. We hope people will start asking questions like “should I really keep my car engine running while cleaning the wind screen?” or “is this the best route between home and school or should I take the long way through the park instead?”".

- What are you going to bring and get at the State of Social Media Summit?
“We will bring a lot of experience dealing with the often complex implementation process, how to involve external parties and what to expect from them. We are always looking at parties interested to team up for the next phase, getting ready for a bigger scale and improving data quality (calibration and interpretation of sensor data)”.

Interested in hearing more about MIMAQ, Johannes and measuring air quality? Meet Johannes at the Summit!

- Register for the Summit
- More info about the presentations

Photo by Kennisland.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 17:14 and is filed under General.