New environment centre will enable people to get air-quality readings on phone app
The Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry and National Telecom (NT) on Wednesday opened the National Environment Data Centre to enable people to check readings of particulate matter (PM) in the air via the RGuard smartphone application.
The move came after the ministry's Digital Economy and Society Development Fund granted a budget to the NT to set up 8,000 air-quality monitoring stations across 77 provinces, focusing on areas where the population is high and at risk of air pollution.
These stations can record air-quality data, such as PM1, PM2.5, PM10, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure and wind direction.
The project has received cooperation from several government agencies, such as the Interior, Education, and Public Health ministries, National Office of Buddhism, Royal Thai Police and Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.
The stations will record air-quality data every five minutes and send them to the centre's Big Data via LoRaWAN network for analysis.
Once plenty of air-quality data is received, the centre will be able to analyse and forecast the possibility of air pollution in each area effectively.
In addition, the National Environment Data Centre is also providing an open data service to enable government and private agencies to utilise air-quality data in their research, statistics and innovation, which will help boost the value of the digital economy as well.
"Apart from complying with the government's policy to take care of citizens' health, this project is also a part of the DES Ministry's pilot projects to create Big Data to enable interested people, educational institutions and private agencies to utilise and develop innovations," the ministry said.