Pollu sense

Inspiration

“It's a living hell”: forest fires destroy more than two million hectares in Bolivia Being one of the countries with the greatest deforestation, forest burning on the planet, and unregulated use of motor vehicles, Bolivia has reached unhealthy levels of air pollution in recent years. Ironically, the purity of the air is emphasized in the lyrics of its anthems "Under the purest sky in America”. But this remained only as an artistic expression captured in music since in 2023 pollution rose to the highest cities in the country, where hundreds of cases of respiratory infections were reported, schools and institutions canceled their activities, and the entire country. We could see the fog and feel the climate change in our breathing.

What it does

The application allows you to enter a photograph of a lichen (Parmeliaceae) to analyze the level of SO2 contamination to which the lichen is exposed, in response, parameter data is obtained.

How we built it

Through an initiative, it was decided to monitor epiphytic lichens on palm trees in a city, one of the most affected. This was necessary to collect information to feed our database, which is useful for training the model. To collect the data, different parameters were taken into account, such as heat sources, vehicular circulation, wind currents, and satellite information, to extract SO2 data by area. For the architecture, tools such as the Flutter framework was used for the development of the application, which executes a classification model through the VERTEX AI API using tools such as Tensorflow, Python, and sci-kit among others, this model was trained with a classification of lichens exposed to three levels of SO2 contamination.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges were to provide the model with a sufficient amount of database, which is intended to increase over time to also include improvements in the application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accuracy of the model, work team, new discoveries and experience

What we learned

Guide ourselves with observation and the papers that day by day reveal bases that can be applied

What's next for Pollu sense

We begin by presenting this tool, with which we aim to protect health, make informed decisions, and contribute to the development of citizen science by monitoring exposure to SO2. All of this is possible thanks to the observation of organisms sensitive to these changes that often seem to be invisible to us