Know how much air pollution you’re breathing in with AirBeam

AirBeam is a personal system for measuring one type of air pollution as you make your way around the city.

Park Slope nonprofit HabitatMap created the device, along with the app that saves its measurements. We covered its development last year. The device measures fine particulate matter — very small bits of dust and soot that, while invisible, harm your lungs once you breathe them in.

The AirBeam takes regular measurements and sends them to your cell phone, which matches them to a map, logs the readings in your personal AirCasting app and then, if you want, adds that to HabitatMap’s larger map of air quality readings.

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When we spoke to Michael Heimbinder, founder of the organization, he said he started doing this sort of work to give environmental justice advocates quality information to work with as they fought to clean up their back yards.

Heimbinder said he focused on fine particulate matter because the portable versions of other air quality measurement tools were not reliable over time.

HabitatMap is also offering a related device that lights up to show the quality of the air around you at that moment, by glowing different colors.

AirBeam accessory. (Image courtesy of HabitatMap)