Packed Launch| A One Health Approach
A One Health Approach
Educ•Air: We Care About the Air
Summary
Our project is a website that acts as an Air Pollution Education playbook. It equips local authorities with the knowledge of the effects of air pollution, the importance of reducing air pollution for public health, and provides interventions on how to do so.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our solution empowers individuals to combat air pollution through education. Our project aims to equip local authorities with a toolkit of educational materials that allow them to promote healthy air activities / instill air-pollution-reducing behaviors in their own locales. It does so by concentrating on 2 key areas:
- Effects of air pollution to human health.
- Effects of air pollution linked against COVID19, and your role in stopping its spread.
Our solution is a portal website that hopes to be a central repository of easy to understand materials local authorities can use to educate those with limited internet access on the effects of poor air quality, and the recommended interventions to reduce air pollution.
Moreover, the site advocates doing your part in the fight against air pollution, by trading up lifestyle choices in our day to day activities. We hope that our website will empower local authorities to effectively educate those with limited internet access, and take air pollution and public health more seriously.
How We Developed This Project
Overall Approach
The team’s problem solving approach is a modified Design Sprint, incorporating the original Design Sprint philosophies of Divergent and Convergent Thinking (Double Diamond / Ideating and then Prioritizing) with research sprints and data science to produce a more well-rounded approach to problem solving. This allowed us to very systematically attack problems in a time-boxed manner, and get to decisions fairly quickly.
The original NASA challenge requirements were quite open-ended, (“present effects of air pollution”), thereby giving the team a lot of room for interpretation and many different paths or specific domains we could pursue. Our initial biggest challenge was scope --- how do we define a clear problem space we want to tackle.
Deciding on Problem Space and Scope
The team engaged in a 1 hour research sprint to get acquainted with the topic, specifically,
who are impacted by the situation, who are more susceptible to negative effects brought about by air pollution, what projects, products or initiatives have been launched to try and combat this.
In addition to the above, we sought to understand the link between COVID-19 mitigation strategies and its overall impact to air quality, and by extension, spread of COVID. We began by listing down the different COVID-19 mitigation strategies and policies enforced by the government, by businesses, and also expanded the search to cover behavior changes among students, teachers, WFH professionals and consumers. Once we had a laundry list of these COVID-19 mitigation strategies and activities, we then went into a Problem Framing workshop (How Might We Sessions) to formalize the problem space we as a group want to tackle. Along with formalizing the problem space is narrowing down the impacted person(s) we want to focus on delivering a solution for.
Ideation
The team shifted from understanding our problem space into ideating solutions, and prioritizing which solution to push through prototyping. We engaged in a data validation activity (using tools like Google Trends) to find proof that this is a problem, and that there are active searches for this topic. We are pleased to say that we have found numerous supporting arguments against the existence of the problem and its impact.
After validating the existence and impact of the problem to our target users (those with limited Internet access), we engaged in a Crazy 8’s workshop, combined with using ‘Round Robin’ and ‘Mash Up’ design sprint workshops in order to build upon the ideas sketched out and nominated in the Crazy 8’s workshop. At this point, we dot-voted our final 4 ideas, and pitted these 4 ideas against a ‘Wow-How-Now’ matrix (grade each idea innovativeness vs feasibility) to decide finally which of these ideas to take to prototyping
Prototyping
Using Wix and Stormboard, we synthesized different ideas and mocked up a wireframe of what we believe to be an easy to use website to deliver complex information in the simplest form possible.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Our initial hypothesis coming into this problem space was that air quality had an direct relationship with the number of Covid-19 Cases --- that is as air quality worsens, the number of COVID19 cases increases. We used 2 primary data sets --- a NO2 data set provided by OMI NO2 Time-Series, and a WHO COVID-19 Tracker data set.
We merged the two data sets together using common keys such as date and city, and we used Power BI to explore the data set. To our everlasting surprise, there doesn’t seem to be a strong relationship between NO2 levels and New Cases of COVID19 on a per day basis.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
Data :
Lamsal, L. N., Krotkov, N. A., Vasilkov, A., Marchenko, S., Qin, W., Yang, E.-S., Fasnacht, Z., Joiner, J., Choi, S., Haffner, D., Swartz, W. H., Fisher, B., and Bucsela, E.: OMI/Aura Nitrogen Dioxide Standard Product with Improved Surface and Cloud Treatments, Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2020-200, in review, 2020.
https://aqicn.org/data-platform/covid19/
Resources:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200427-how-air-pollution-exacerbates-covid-19