Mitigating air pollution with IoT sensor network
Hawa Dawa is a digital start-up which provides actionable information on air quality. The ability to compile all existing sources of air quality data, correlate them with relevant information and finally create an easy-to-use output makes the solution the ideal first step for mitigating air pollution and its impacts.
Hawa Dawa deploys state-of-the art technologies from reliable and robust sensors to IoT, KI and cloud services. The cross-functional team covers the entire range of skills – from technology to epidemiology. A solution actually can be the key to a healthy and liveable environment.
Hawa Dawa is a 2020 digital start up, stating its mission to bring air quality into the mainstream of decision making. “We have the challenge of bad air quality. Air quality in cities, but also globally, is affecting health as well as climate. The contribution of Hawa Dawa is making all these impacts visible. We quantify them by providing high resolution data and data based analytics. Our portfolio is based on user interfaces, which support different levels of technical analysis”, says Karim Tarraf, CEO of the start-up.
The software supports two main tasks: creating area-wide maps of air quality and displaying the data from company’s own measurements. It took years of efforts to achieve quality results with their proprietary measurement device, which now are close to the measurements of public stations. That makes a big difference: the cost of device is only a fraction of the cost of a public station.
The goal is to provide air quality data for any place within the city. The models are based on machine learning, it ensures that the most relevant data is used. The main customers are cities and city-related organisations. “They use our data to optimise their activities, and to generate new digital services for their citizens. The second important customer group is companies which use our data to enhance their products and services, e.g. navigation systems, route recommendations for bicyclists or fitness,“ says K.Tarraf.
German Barbara Loferer’s project Hawa Dawa is the winner in the Category of Smart Settlements & Urbanization of 2020 World Summit Award.
