Allergy Reporter

Jeff BoydSam Olsen

Motivation

Related Work

• Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content Through Mobile Phones and Social Participationo Search a given area

• Twitter: Small messages, What are you doing now?o What’s it like now?

Related Work

• Pollen.como Websiteo Widgets

Related Work

• Official pollen.com iPhone/iPod Touch App

• Does NOT do automatic location estimation

• NO social networking aspirations

Original Goal

• Incorporate information from Pollen.com and AirNow.gov into a mobile application to provide air quality information

• Include a microblog feature in the application, thereby adding a “human sensor” to the reporting, and encouraging social interaction

Ideal Architecture

Roadblocks

• AirNow.gov has a private API for accessing Air Quality Index datao We didn’t receive a response when requesting

access• There are publicly accessible Google Earth .kml

fileso The files are large, making them impractical to

parse on a mobile computero The location data is too course, only containing

select cities

Roadblocks cont.

• Pollen.com provides no API, but...

Workaround

• Pollen.com does provide an interface for looking up pollen count information by zip code

• No authenticity token means we have a solution: Page Scraping!!

• Drawbackso Slowo Unstable, can change at any moment

Realized Architecture

User Interface

Microblog Features

• Location based on zip, blogs associated with cities

 • Truncate to 70 characters (half a tweet)

 • Communicates with server over HTTP

 • Display most recent first

User Interface

User Interface

Testing Questions

• Efficacy of a mobile pollen reportero How does a mobile pollen reporter compare

to a strictly web-based tool? Other tools?o Can a mobile application be solely relied

upon for all allergy/respiratory information?o Who does this application work best for?

How do we improve it for non-target demographics?

Testing Questions cont.• Social impact of microblog feature

o Using humans as sensorsUsefulness compared to mechanical sensors?Personal motivation to blog?

o Are there unintended uses of the feature?

Future Work• Integrate with AirNow.gov to get AQI information

 • Gain access to Pollen.com API to improve efficiency• Gather feedback on usefulness of microblogging.

Research what works well and how to improve