Alivio

I built Alivio to give asthmatics real-time, hyperlocal air-quality data when city AQI readings are too sparse to be actionable. The device is a wrist or backpack mounted PM2.5-based AQI monitor with an on-board GPS and an LED severity indicator. I integrated a particulate sensor with a Li-ion power subsystem, and wrote embedded C firmware to communicate with the sensor over UART, compute AQI metrics, and manage system state. The system uses a microcontroller to interface the PM2.5 sensor, GPS module, and status LED, with iterative enclosure and airflow design to improve sampling consistency and accuracy. When I handed the project off to other students, I was developing the firmware to stream the device’s GPS and PM2.5 readings to the cloud so parents could track their child’s pollution exposure in an app. The broader vision was to deploy thousands of devices to crowdsource hyper-local air quality data at far higher resolution than existing AQI monitors. I obtained a provisional patent for the device and our team won grants to build it.