There are more and more simple measuring options that can positively counteract the increasing pollution. One of them is our crowdsourcing IoT platform pulse.eco.
The application, which has been active and available to interested parties since 2018, is constantly changing. Not only the measuring sensors and software are constantly being renewed and updated, but the community is also growing. Pulse.eco and its network actively live the motto "co-create the future of your city" fulfilling the vision of the self-growing community. Its goal is to improve the quality of life by making the collected data freely available to everyone, thanks to analysis, visualization, and open API, thus drawing attention to the environmental conditions.
More and more members are joining, installing sensors in their cities and residential areas, making it possible to measure the various environmental impacts: air pollution, noise, humidity, or temperature, to name just a few. New measurement functions can also be added if required. A mobile app for iOS and Android devices has been available since autumn 2021, which, among other things, displays the measured data.
In Switzerland, pulse.eco is so far collecting data in four different cities: Lausanne, Bern, Grenchen, and Zurich. Nine sensors are currently active in the city of Zurich.
"One of the goals in the early days of pulse.eco was community building, which we have successfully pursued and implemented. In the last three years, the community has grown both geographically and quantitatively," says Chantal Stäuble, Co-Head Business Development Digital Enterprise at Netcetera. "Pulse.eco is in use in thirteen countries and thirty-six cities across Europe. You do not need in-depth technological know-how to install pulse.eco. We provide infrastructure and applications and invite everyone interested in technology and the environment to participate in the project. With the collected data we want to generate knowledge about the environment and visualize the current situation."
With this positive development of pulse.eco, the awareness of private individuals, authorities, and other stakeholder groups for this topic is growing. But not only in the area of environmental development, but also in the technologies used. Pance Cavkovski, Senior Software Developer and initiator of pulse.eco: “In the past few years, we have seen tremendous new things coming to pulse.eco, both from the developers and the community such as improved web functionalities and performance, extended API, historical data exploring, updated native mobile apps, LoRaWAN TTN V3 integration, multiple translations, third-party data fetching and much more. As for the future, we are always aiming on making the applications, network, devices, and all the information produced more accessible and binging it closer to the users. On the one hand, we will provide more options on how and with what devices the users can connect, while on the other, we want to make as much sense of the data as possible: seamless data exploring, smart and custom visualizations, data correlation extractions, forecasting, early warning system, etc."
All information about the cities, how the platform works, and how you can become part of the network without any technical knowledge can be found on pulse.eco.