CITIES’ Digital Initiatives
CITIESair – Air Quality Monitoring Network in Abu Dhabi (2021 – ongoing)
Research Supervisor: Dr. Federico Bernardini
Research Assistant – Student Supervisor: Vince Nguyen
Student Assistant:
– Tarlan Askaruly and Swostik Pati (Fall 2024 – ongoing)
– Jun Ooi (Fall 2023 – Summer 2024)
– Phil Wee (Fall 2024 – Spring 2024)
CITIESair is an integrated system of air quality devices and specialized software designed for educational institutions in Abu Dhabi. CITIESair’s mission is to empower data-driven policies to safeguard school communities from outdoor air pollution and improve indoor air quality. This project responds to CITIES’ strategic objective of promoting sustainable living, improving the overall well-being of Abu Dhabi citizens, and contributing to the UAE’s efforts to reduce air pollution’s mortality rate from 64.8 in 2017 to 60.2 per 100,000 people by 2030 – UAE National Air Quality Strategy (2021-2031).
CITIESair achieves this by equipping schools with tools to safeguard students, educators, and staff from outdoor air pollution, such as the historical dashboard, offering detailed data analytics and visualizations for hourly, daily, and monthly trends. Each school receives a set of indoor and outdoor air quality sensors, enabling real-time outdoor vs. indoor comparison and encouraging the expansion of indoor sensor coverage for comprehensive indoor air quality monitoring on campuses.
Our Members
First established and piloted at NYUAD, CITIESair has since strategically expanded to 11 other schools across Abu Dhabi emirate as of September 2024. CITIESair’s schools network spans not only the core urban center of Abu Dhabi city but also other inland settlements such as in Ghayathi, Ruwais, and Madinat Zayed, with key partnerships with educational institutions from Aldar and ANOC.
Impacts of CITIESair
From an obscure topic, air quality has become an important consideration for many school residents when incorporating their daily routines, such as exercising or bringing the kids outdoors. Detailed data analytics and visualizations enable real-time outdoor vs. indoor comparison and encourage the expansion of indoor sensor coverage for comprehensive indoor air quality monitoring in schools. This has led to the development of scientifically informed air quality policies and real-time, data-driven decisions in schools such as Theodore Monod and Cranleigh, among others.
Beyond the school community, CITIESair forged a strategic partnership with IQAir, a global leader in air quality, in Fall 2023. This collaboration allows CITIESair to share outdoor air quality data on the world’s leading website to benefit local communities surrounding CITIESair schools. In one short year, CITIESair’s followers on IQAir skyrocketed to almost 20,000 users, putting it as the Top Educational Contributor on the platform.
CITIESair’s impacts ultimately extend to academic research. CITIESair’s dataset at NYUAD is publicly available to inform communities, enable research with accurate real-time data, and develop new policies. This data accessibility inspired Capstone students and researchers at NYUAD to experiment with smart air quality notifications, the result of which has been presented at 12th World Environmental Education Congress (WEEC) and 4th Air Sensors International Conference (ASIC). Ultimately, this will inform the university leadership’s on designing data-driven policies on wellness, further cement NYUAD’s reputation as an exemplary institution in sustainable living in Abu Dhabi.
What’s Next?
Numerous factors influence our daily air quality exposure, such as how much time we spend at home, at work, in school, or outdoors. Indeed, what truly matters is our daily average personal exposure to air pollutants. While improving outdoor air quality may be a long-term endeavor requiring global government cooperation, we can take immediate action to enhance indoor air quality. So, what’s the next step for CITIESair? We are assisting institutions in delivering the highest indoor air quality standard, which can counterbalance the impact of low outdoor air quality on our daily exposure to air pollution.
The first step in this direction is to equip every building within school campuses and universities with indoor air quality sensors, enabling hyperlocal, continuous, and long-term monitoring to assess indoor air quality comprehensively. In fact, CITIESair has equipped all 10 NYUAD campus buildings with indoor air quality sensors and expanding its monitoring network to encompass more schools in Abu Dhabi.
Most importantly, starting from academic year 2024-2025, CITIESair will launch a year-long pilot air purification study in 2 schools in Abu Dhabi, in partnership with IQAir, to study the efficiency of air purifiers in improving indoor air quality. The result of the pilot study will provide a proof-of-concept for implementation of such systems across CITIESair’s school network to safeguard the respiratory health of every student, especially those with underlying respiratory issues.
Reference:
- [1] Health Effects Institute. 2020. State of Global Air 2020. Special Report.
- Boston, MA:Health Effects Institute.
- [2] Li, Donghai, et al. “Fluorescent Reconstitution on Deposition of PM 2.5 in Lung and Extrapulmonary Organs.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 7, 2019, pp. 2488–93, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818134116.
- [3] Xing, Yu-Fei et al. “The impact of PM2.5 on the human respiratory system.” Journal of thoracic disease vol. 8,1 (2016): E69-74. doi:10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2016.01.19
- [4] “World’s Most Polluted Countries.” IQAir, 2023, https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries