 You know, back in around 2004 or so, I met Samit Saxena. He was with Mahiru Jassawala, and they came to the studios of Hawaii Public Radio, and we had a show about the science at East West Center. At the time, I remember that Mahiru Jassawala, who has since passed, was dealing in satellite technology. She was a star in satellite technology. You were right there working with her, yeah. Right, right, right. So welcome back. It's always nice to have you. And as I said before, we began the show. We're getting old together. Thanks, Jay. It's always a pleasure to be back here. I think this is my fourth visit. Yeah, okay, great. And great to share all the stuff with you. So, I mean, you've done something very interesting lately. Yeah, you're an environmental scientist, environmental engineer at East West Center. And for those of you who may not understand that, East West Center is more than just diplomacy. It's more than just, I wouldn't call it, social issues around the Pacific. It's also science. And it has some very distinguished sciences there who write very distinguished papers. And Sumit is one of them. And that's why it's so interesting to hear him talk about his recent trip. And his trip involved air quality sensors, one of which is on the table. We're going to talk about that. And he went to Vietnam and to India to test them out for the use by citizen scientists in those areas to get a handle with an app and the sensors, get a handle on the quality of the air there. So what motivated you to make this trip Sumit? You know, actually, you touched a relevant point when you mentioned that the East West Center is primarily not only for diplomacy and social issues and cultural training and leadership programs. So we do have a science department or a division. And in recent years, we have been trying to see how to translate the science work into the public policy fields, into the diplomacy fields, into the leadership field. And there are many ways to do that. And one of the ways that we are trying to experiment with, that is how do you link research, academic research with practical stuff, with diplomacy, with leadership is to try it through something that we are calling the citizen science. I mean, it's not an East West Center term, but it's something that we found there and we said, okay, let's try this out. And the other thing that we are trying to, in this specific context, we are trying to do is to initiate some work on smart cities in Asia. You know, the East West Center, we work only in the Asia Pacific region. And some cities there in Asia have taken a leap in terms of building the infrastructure for smart cities. In terms of, you know, Wi-Fi, broadband, telecommunications, hot spots, stuff that I really don't understand. But that's the skeleton, that's the backbone. Yeah, it ultimately goes to quality of life, doesn't it? Yeah, and that is the essential first step, of course, without that infrastructure backbone, nothing else will happen in smart city programs. But I don't think people have thought enough about that. Assuming one day you have that fantastic infrastructure, everyone has broadband, everyone has free Wi-Fi in a cafe or wherever, what is going to be the knowledge content, or what is going to be the environmental knowledge content of these networks that's going to help in smart cities program. So that was one hook that we were trying to attach ourselves to and the other hook is the citizen science. You know, there's a variant of it called participatory research. Participatory research, basically you're trying to address the problems of a community, but rather than assume that, you know, A, what the problem is, B, you know, how to study it, C, you know, what the solutions are, rather than assume all that, you say, guys, let's sit down together, tell us what your problems are, prioritize them for us, what kind of data collection methods you think are appropriate, what would you like us to do with the results and so on. Yeah. Oh, there are so many, so many points and factors and factors in what you described. Let me unpack, at least in my perception, some of them. Number one, of course, as we both discussed, the East West Center does more than just diplomacy and culture and public policy. It does science, but it's also, and it does science all over the Pacific Rim, including as far as India, which is, you know, a mainstay. And I think it is our East West Center, meaning it belongs to Hawaii. Sure, it's got a lot of funding by the federal government, but it lives in the university, it's in our community, it operates out of our community, and it travels a lot. And what does it travel with many, many things, but one of the things it travels with is science, and that's impressive. And it's an altruistic, completely altruistic kind of thing, what you do. The other thing is you're using modern technology, call it citizen science technology, which is, you know, which the common man and woman can use in terms of finding out about that person's environment. So that's another thing, and that's more than taking test tubes out there, it's taking devices out there that anyone can use, that's another fact. Finally, it's got this whole notion of the app, and the idea that you can gain tremendous amount of data using the app by individual citizen scientists, and then you can collate and analyze that data using computers, and it tells us much more about our world. We're having a fire drill in the building, Sumit. I heard that. So let's take a short break and we'll come back when the fire drill dies down. It's only a drill, Sumit. Okay, so I won't need to measure the smoke. Aloha, I'm Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech, Hawaii. Aloha. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech, Hawaii. Broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. And finally, this is Sumit Saxena. He's an environmental scientist at the East West Center and he's just made a trip to Vietnam and India, which we'll talk about, with sensors that measure air quality and that do scientific analysis on air quality. So the point I make is that we need to know more about the environment in a world which has increasing difficulties with the environment, where the environment is degrading while we watch. We need to know more about it everywhere. There are no exceptions to this. And so when you go to a place that does have issues with air quality, you're learning things that are applicable everywhere. It's a great contribution. So tell us, you know, so I guess I would say that I've stated what I think is your purpose. Am I right? Oh, you were absolutely right. So now let me add to that now. When we at the East West Center want to initiate programs on smart cities or citizen science, we could have chosen from umpteen topics, but our in-house expertise is largely on issues such as land use change, forestry, climate change, and air pollution. Now I'm the air pollution guy at the East West Center, so I'm using that as a lens or as a channel into smart cities and citizen science initiatives. So now to step back a bit, recently the World Health Organization has estimated that worldwide about one and a half million people are dying prematurely because of air pollution in urban areas. There's also of course another little higher figure for air pollution from household cooking in poor countries, but that's another issue altogether. The work I'm going to talk about today is the urban air pollution in Asian cities. So off this worldwide global figure of one and a half million or so deaths per annum. I would say more than 80 percent is in the Asia Pacific region and as you can guess most of that's happening in China and India. So it's clearly it's a hot issue that's worthy of attention at the East West Center. Now for almost 30 years I have been mainly doing risk assessment for air pollution issues, but and one thing, one component there is the monitoring of air pollution. Now traditionally air pollution has been monitored just like you measure weather, you know, temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed. You have these massive devices they can be as big as a post box and you install them on tops of buildings and that's how government and scientists have been measuring air pollution. Now those of course are the gold standard in terms of research or scientific credibility, but those are expensive A and because they are expensive you can't have monitoring stations all over the city. For example I think wow who just has two or three of them. On the tops of buildings. On the tops of buildings. I think one in Baba Point. And they radio their data back to Central Point. These days a lot of stations, the world radio in their data using telemetry. Earlier it used to be just you download the data, you pass it on manually and so on. But yes you're right, now they do have systems which where online in real time you can radio in the data to a central command station. Is there a metric to me? In other words is there you know a scale of some kind one to ten and if you're at one you know you don't have a lot of particles in the air if you're in ten you do something like that. Yes see the most scientific and fundamental way of measuring it is in basically in terms of density how many grams of the pollutant per gallon of air or per liter of air so on. But that's a metric that citizens or most common people won't understand. You know if I tell you so many nanograms per meter cube it doesn't make any sense to you. So for that reason primarily to communicate the risks due to air pollution many years ago different governments developed what we call an air quality index. So it's a scale as you said one could be the least polluted and ten could be most polluted. Sometimes even that one to ten scale or one to hundred scale cannot be understood by the common man. So it had to be a further simplified further classified. So now they talk of these in terms of color bands so like code red means it's absolutely bad don't you know. Everybody can understand that. Yeah today is like the military sense of code red. So absolutely don't stir out of your house. Code orange could mean if you're a healthy individual you can go out you can take your morning walk you can have a workout but senior citizens young babies anyone who has asthma or any other respiratory allergy better stay at home. Code orange could mean that you know things are bad but not too bad don't overexert yourself. You know green is yeah great just go out and do whatever you want. So what's a good color now. Yeah of course it depends on how different jurisdictions have codified this but obviously code greens green is good. Yeah I think green yellow orange red these are the rainbows. Yeah so coming back so that's the traditional way and the scientific way to do it is very expensive and there's also a cultural movement now because of social media and you know Facebook and WhatsApp people demand information right there's a consciousness there's an awareness people want to know what's happening to their environment and for that you just can't rely on just two or three stations in Hanoi or two or three stations in Jakarta and so on so people began to develop sensors which are A inexpensive B they are portable and light three and they're easy to use. The ones you're talking about send the signal send the data back by what by no no a sensor by definition is something that simply measures so when we talk of an environmental sensor it is something that either you're measuring water quality or you're measuring air pollution a specific pollutant that sensor is tailored to measure a certain pollutant in air or a certain pollutant in water now the device can be made more sophisticated by having the ability to store the data on a chip and then later you hook the device to a computer and download the data you can make it all even more sophisticated by connecting that sensor to a wi-fi and then in real time you're able to look at how things are changing in time and space so you have these options and the more bells and whistles you have obviously the device becomes more expensive more sophisticated and more challenging to use but that's a trend yeah but they want the more sophisticated ones so till now basically there have been a dozen or so companies that have developed sensors for air pollution lastly smoke focusing on smoke that is particulate matter in more common words dust so and these work on a kind of laser scattering principle and so far the devices that the commercially available devices are the types that you buy it you put it in your bedroom or you put it in your living room people do that yeah they've been doing that oh and you hook it up to your wi-fi or you every now and then you download the data and then you have the confidence that you know that in my living room or in my bedroom this is how bad the pollution is or if you thought you had done a good job of buying an excellent filter you know air conditioning system with filtration and all that then you can see that this is for you this is for your house yeah your room and your air yeah and one analogy i'd like to draw is that sometimes you're not happy knowing what the ambient temperature or humidity is yeah you know you don't want to go to acu weather you don't want to go to weather underground you would rather have a small device in your living room or your bedroom that shows you what the temperature and humidity are another analogy is that you might want to measure your own blood pressure right now maybe the device that you use that you buy from cosco or longs is not as accurate as the one at queens or at kaiser sure but for whatever reason you are you and your doctors satisfied that within the levels of accuracy that's going to give you some early warning signals or some ballpark number or where your blood pressure is or getting back to the temperature thing that you you know you're in the ballpark of a comfortable environment yeah temperature so you don't need to be highly yeah you don't need to be precise to the third or fourth decimal place or so on yeah so that's the analogy i like to use with what's happening in the air pollution sensors and because i'm the first to acknowledge that these sensors are far from accurate and even some of the manufacturers are pretty candid about it they say that we know that this is not stuff that you're going to use to publish in science journal or nature journal but it is something that of course they're making efforts to make it more accurate but they know that right now it can be used in ways that make citizens feel that they have some control over their lives okay so when we're talking about this device it's become mysterious already on the table can you tell us this i'm sure this is not the only one yeah there are others on the market right where do you get this and what does it do and how popular is it and why do you prefer it yeah i came across this when i was doing a google search to find out how many such manufacturers and brands are out there and there are a couple of things that i liked about this particular device which most other commercially available sensors don't have and that is that this also has the ability to track your movement and using gps now as i told you it this is just a sensor it doesn't have the electronics for the wi-fi or for directly you know connecting to the any kind of telecommunication setup but the manufacturers are smart what they did is they put in a bluetooth here and with the bluetooth you connect to your android phone and then basically it is using the computing power of your phone to do everything else so inside this device there are only two things the environmental sensor and the bluetooth it's brilliant yeah it's brilliant and they're not doing duplication because you're using the phone yeah yeah yeah so all you need so now this particular device is measuring it can measure temperature humidity and three sizes of particulate matters p m 1 p m 2.5 and p m 10 these are what are those things p m is particulate matter so the smaller the particle diameter the you know more likely it can go to the deepest parts of your lung you know when you inhale it so those are the most dangerous guys so p m 1 is the most dangerous guy then p m 2.5 is the intermediate diameter and p m 10 now p m 10 is what is being measured in asia because that's you know in asia it's they find it you know difficult to transition to the expensive p m 2.5 measuring devices in the us p m 2.5 has become the standard the epa is measuring p m 2.5 and they have just been about big unmeasuring p m 1 also so this device is p m 1 p m 2.5 and p m 10 and also temperature and humidity and as i said you have if you have google maps on your phone it it's recording your latitude and longitude every second every three seconds and every three seconds it's recording how polluted the place was where you were and you can when you there's a simple on and off button and on the app too you can start and end the session and you can annotate the session any way you want and at the end of it you come back home and you can look at either the charts that within the last half an hour you know how did the chart go up and down yeah but you can also see it on the google map that which route you took and at each point of the route the color their color coded because and i've seen in my pilot studies in vietnam and india whenever i'm at a traffic signal you know because the cars are all idling and there's more more emissions yeah it spikes up so whenever i see out now orange or a red dot on the google map i know okay that was a place where my whatever i was traveling in the bus or the auto rickshaw or taxi you know is there so okay let me ask some questions okay so this is this is gathering data temperature and those those cc1 2.5 cm1 2.5 and it's it's it's saving it or rather it's transmitting it immediately yeah immediately right um to an app which you have downloaded yeah on your smartphone okay so you got to be reasonably close to it you got to be bluetooth right right and then that your your phone is going to be generating a database with various fields for the particulates and location and humidity and temperature and whatever else it's quite amazing this little thing and you can wear it on your on your on your chest can you carry it in your pocket no yeah to be open to the air right yeah but what i often do is i just put it here yeah the the open openings here they're not blocked yeah and i like it this is so small it goes into the pocket and my nose is not very far from the inlet so i'm getting a pretty good uh metric or a measure of what the pollution is in this zone yeah it looks like a handkerchief a folded hand very debonair you can wear in a suit pocket as well it'll happen someday i don't know whether you saw the photographs a couple of years ago there was a very high-end uh modeling show in beijing uh where what they were modeling was uh air pollution mass so these very beautiful chinese models uh it was not the clothes that the people were looking at it was the mass and i'm sure each mass must have been like five hundred dollars a thousand dollars because it's for that type of crowd but fashion it's now entered the fashion world yeah so what is this cost yeah so this particular thing costs two hundred fifty dollars which is about the same cost as it's you know the other the other comparison but most of the other brands that and i'm testing out those also they don't have the mobility mode um they the gps the gps thing they don't have it as yet they they just get your coordinates from your wi-fi and they live stream the data to a cloud and everyone anywhere in the world who's a member or who signs up for free to become a part of that website you can look at you know what these sensors which are located in different parts of the world what kind of data they're reporting so that that was the link that i'd like to cover with you so you can look at it for yourself you can bluetooth it to your phone you can go home and put it on your screen um and you can you can see what what you've done but you also want to upload it to some sort of network system yeah which can tell you all about the city you're in or the country you're in or the world you're in right yeah actually not that really is the most exciting part because i started off by saying you might be curious about your own exposure levels but the most fascinating aspect is then this all becomes part of the cloud the data and if you're willing to that is and the crowdsourcing kind of movement that's going on so this particular device is linked to a website called habitat map habitat map so it didn't begin with the air pollution component it just began as a website where people could report what's happening in their neighborhood in terms of whether it's crime or whether it is garbage or whether it's a quality of roads whatever social environmental issues in their neighborhood that became a place where people could describe their neighborhoods in their own terms and that they could provide data photographs there then the the people associated with the website also got interested in air pollution and they developed this sensor and then finally using the bluetooth app there is a way that you say okay i'm happy with what the data i'm collected now upload this to the fabulous yeah now now the competitors you know you mentioned there are others that do the same thing did they also upload the habitat map or no they don't have to get involved in the system so one of them in fact it's called purple air now purple air has an association with the weather underground website if you if i don't know if you use that weather underground so they have their own website where people can upload in fact it's it's the opposite there you know that device automatically uploads it to the website and it's harder for you to get your own sensors data downloaded it's not in the picture yeah it's not impossible but it's not very straightforward either that you said okay this sensor was in my bedroom i want to know the minute-to-minute data for the that sensor it's not straightforward as this particular device but everyone else in the world will see what's going on in your bedroom i don't mind sharing so last questions for me and that is you went to a city in india you went to a city in vietnam you took these with you did you distribute them and you know i'm asking for a lot of information here um and what who did you distribute them to what happened what was what did you learn right uh so this is a program the east wascent has initiated on smart cities and citizen science air pollution stuff so we uh purchased a lot of these and i distributed these to about three or four institutions in vietnam and a couple of institutions in india and one of the things that i was very conscious is that i'll collab these institutions are collaborators in these countries some of them one one or two of them are typical science universities because they are the guys who will actually test the scientific accuracy of these devices but i was very keen and conscious that i should also distribute these to some organizations who are like voluntary organizations in those countries in those countries or like what we call NGOs there and uh of people who are from the you know who are nothing to organizations or who have nothing to do with science but they're into community uh that's the problem yeah because i said ultimately if these things have to uh you know get into the hands of citizens you guys are the intermediate uh you know party yeah can help us do it and if you if you have problems understanding what this device can do or not do then we need to address that first before putting these in into the hands of citizens on the flip side then we said because you come from another perspective you will give us some interesting ideas of how these data or these kind of information can be used in your countries in your that's up to them up to them but they should know the threat they should know at the traffic light it's it's hard and in some neighborhoods or cities it's too hard and too many people are dying from respiratory action to it and so what you're doing is delivering the data to organizations and governments that can actually improve the quality of life in those areas and that's a great gift well thank you Sumi this has been a really great discussion i'm so happy to know about it and i may go out and get one of those oh yeah sure it's not likely in hawaii but you know this is one of the reasons i contacted you about this is because i thought you know the folks in the big island sure yeah they will now have some concerns about air pollution yeah there it is see we have to we have to be aware of this too right here in the land of fresh air we have to be aware thank you Sumi thanks day great great to have you on the show come back soon