The Citizen Sense kit developed in the course of the practice-based research on “Pollution Sensing” is a response to the concerns of community members, who provided information via Citizen Sense “logbooks” that asked for input on key environmental and health concerns related to natural gas infrastructure.
The Citizen Sense kit itself, which was distributed to around 30 participants, contains a passive sampling badge for monitoring BTEX emissions (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, which are substances associated with oil and gas production and that are also hazardous to human health); a “Speck” device for monitoring particulate matter (PM) 2.5 (and these devices were generously loaned to us from the Create Lab at Carnegie Mellon); a private platform for mapping monitoring locations and viewing real-time data; and a Citizen Sense logbook with instructions for use.
Citizen Sense Kit in the field
Along with the Citizen Sense kit, three Frackboxes developed by Citizen Sense were installed at key infrastructure sites. The citizen-gathered PM 2.5 air quality data is now available for anyone to analyze using the Citizen Sense Data Analysis Toolkit, which was built by Citizen Sense in collaboration with Thiam Kok Lau, and adapting openair open-source software, so that citizens could analyze their own data.
