Air Aware Labs gets academic

Welcome to the seventy-third edition of our newsletter, as we get published, continue to build our network of sporting events partners and undertake further user testing for AirTrack! This newsletter is aimed at investors, collaborators, future hires and early adopters of our products.

Our aim in publishing our first academic article was to show how a deeper understanding of when and where air pollution impacts people can enhance decision-making. The article looks at actual exposures of people moving around English cities and how their interaction with air pollution - and therefore health risks - changed across time and space. Using this data set, we identified that 5-7pm on weekdays was a particularly bad time for air pollution exposure. But given the spatial variation of pollutant gases in particular, this can be taken into account in local and city-wide planning decisions to protect health. Please join us on our mission - Personalising Air Quality, for everyone.

***************************

Hot off the press

• our first peer-reviewed academic article as a team is out in Cities Journal. Read the full article - it can be downloaded for free until 27 November. And read more from our CSO and lead author, William Hicks
• our support to global events continues to be our focus, including Wings of Survival in the Americas, clean air walks/runs in Uganda and many more
• and we are delighted to start planning for our input to London Marathon 2027 - the epic two day event!

***********************************

Go with us towards clean air

• we are midway through our latest round of user testing, with a particular focus on our AirTrack score - it is not too late to get involved, with more workshops next week
• can you introduce us to more organisations who organise athletics events?
• we continue to be amazed by all the support we get from far and wide. Big shout outs to Alexandra Smith Darya Kamkalova Paul Nwachukwu David Janner-Klausner (he/him) Mackline Arinda Reuben John Molina Ana Luiza Savi, MSc Ohad Zivan Nina van Schaick Georgie Eyre Laudelino Javier Sánchez de León Linares Holly Woodford Laura Eid Alberto Perona Rajesh SHARMA Chris Curry MD, PhD Andrea Sommer Sujita Purushothaman Gideon Hoffman David Awad-Clark Claudia Castro Faccetti Diana Gabrielyan Colette Harris Mihretu Tagesse Sergindo. We hope you'll all continue with us towards clean air.

*********************

Meet the partner

We have started a series of introductions to our key partners. This edition we are meeting Mona Jaber, Reader in Internet of Things (IoT) at Queen Mary University of London. Mona says: "My research sits at the intersection of IoT and machine learning, with a particular focus on accelerating the transition towards more sustainable cities. I am passionate about translating research into practical solutions that improve people's lives, particularly by encouraging greater uptake of active travel. As both a Londoner and a researcher developing digital tools to support decision-making, I am particularly interested in understanding what prevents people from cycling, walking or using public transport, and what leads them to rely on private cars instead.

"We began investigating these questions in 2024 within my research group at QMUL. Our observations combined footage from forward-facing cameras with accelerometer, gyroscope and GPS measurements, allowing us to capture both the surrounding road environment and cyclists' movements and behaviour. We subsequently launched a public website to crowdsource cyclists' assessments of road safety and developed an explainable multimodal machine learning framework to investigate the relationships between road characteristics, environmental context and perceived cycling safety. We are now expanding our data collection to develop a more comprehensive understanding of cycling experiences, incorporating behavioural characteristics and environmental exposure alongside the infrastructure and mobility observations already collected.

"We have been collaborating with Air Aware Labs to explore how high-resolution air quality information could complement our existing research. This will enable us to investigate whether locations associated with poor perceived safety also coincide with elevated pollution exposure, and whether particular road characteristics, such as shared bus lanes, congestion or proximity to heavy traffic, contribute to both. For example, a route that feels relatively safe because it is physically separated from traffic may still expose cyclists to poor air quality, while a quieter alternative may offer benefits that conventional journey-planning tools do not adequately capture. Our immediate objective is to develop data-driven route recommendations that help cyclists choose safer and healthier journeys, while our longer-term ambition is to translate these observations into actionable evidence for transport planners, local authorities and policymakers. We are recruiting cyclists for our study and anyone interested is welcome to contact Mona."

***************

Get in touch

Please follow Air Aware Labs to stay in touch with our progress. If anything in this newsletter has piqued your interest, please send me (Louise Thomas) or William Hicks a message! You can also email us at hello@airawarelabs.com

‍