Analyzing Indoor Air Quality sensor data in CODAP

[Donna Auguste]

I’m working on a research project (DataTip) that involves families collecting and analyzing residential indoor air quality (IAQ) data, and correlating their IAQ data with asthma symptom data to identify asthma triggers.  In the past, I’ve created data science micro-lessons in Excel so that the families could look for patterns.  Now I’m developing some micro-lessons in CODAP.   If anyone else in this forum is interested/exploring something similar, let’s share what we figure out on the journey.

[Jonathan Sandoe]

I am curious what sensors are involved (e.g. manufacturer and type) and how they connect to the computer (e.g. USB, bluetooth, …). With the Excel lessons, do the sensors directly interface to Excel or do they, for example, write to a CSV file? In all likelihood integrating with CODAP is going to involve a plugin. There may be one already available, though.

[Donna Auguste]

For realtime consumer indoor air quality sensors, I like both the Speck sensor (www.specksensor.com) and the Foobot sensor (www.foobot.com).  For the 2018 DataTip research study, we’re using Foobot because it detects both PM2.5 and tVOCs — we especially need the tVOC data.  Foobot connects to cloud servers via wifi, and there is an IFTTT applet that will move a snapshot of data to a Google Drive spreadsheet every 5 minutes.  Each snapshot of data includes a timestamp, global pollution, PM, tVOC, CO2, temperature, humidity.  Foobot also has an API, which we use to copy 24 hours of data into a database once per night.

[Jonathan Sandoe]

Interesting!

So, if I understand, the idea would be to pull into CODAP current or recent data for the family’s sensor periodically. Is that right? This is doable by creating a CODAP plugin. If you have Javascript skills or have someone available with Javascript skills, this is not difficult. Here are a couple of documents to get started: https://github.com/concord-consortium/codap/wiki/Getting-Started-With-CODAP-Plugins, and https://github.com/concord-consortium/codap/wiki/CODAP-Data-Interactive-Plugin-API.

Jonathan

[Jonathan Sandoe]

Hi Donna,

I took a look at the Foobot API (http://api.foobot.io/apidoc/index.html). It looks pretty straightforward, although its not clear through the documentation how to get an API key if you don’t have an account nor how to get an account if you don’t have a device. Conceptually, though, the API is close to a lot of other cloud APIs that work well with CODAP. To give you a sense of this, here is a CODAP document that accesses periodically the USGS database of recent earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or more: https://codap.concord.org/app/#shared=36160 . Although it is a quite different subject matter, it is, with respect to being “live”, similar to the application you have in mind, as I understand it.

Jonathan

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