One of the biggest challenges in indoor air quality research is the lack of open, real-world data. While outdoor air quality has benefited from large public datasets for years, indoor environments remain largely a black box despite the fact that most people spend around 90% of their time indoors. Today, we're introducing a new optional feature that allows AirGradient users to share their indoor air quality data for research and public benefit.
By making indoor air quality data openly available, we can enable researchers, developers, and the wider community to better understand how indoor environments affect our health and wellbeing.
We are already working with researchers interested in exploring topics such as:
- Mold risk prediction
- Thermal comfort and healthy indoor environments
- Understanding indoor pollution sources
- Evaluating the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies
- Relationships between indoor and outdoor air quality
The more diverse and geographically distributed the dataset becomes, the more valuable these insights will be.
Open Data Creates Shared Knowledge
All shared data will be made available under the CC-BY-SA license through the AirGradient public API.
This is important because it ensures that the resulting research, models, and insights can be openly shared back with the community. Rather than creating proprietary datasets that only benefit a few organizations, we want to build a resource that benefits everyone.
Over time, we hope this will lead to practical tools, benchmarks, and recommendations that help people improve their indoor environments and make better decisions about ventilation, filtration, heating, cooling, and moisture control.
Privacy has always been a core AirGradient value, and participation is entirely optional.
If you choose to share your data:
- Your location name will be obfuscated.
- Device coordinates will be blurred by approximately 10 km or more.
- Only the information necessary for research purposes will be made available.
- If you also operate an outdoor monitor, indoor and outdoor measurements may be linked because understanding that relationship is often critical for research.
Our goal is to maximize the usefulness of the data while protecting your privacy.
How to Participate
Enabling data sharing takes less than a minute.
Simply open your location settings in the AirGradient Dashboard, navigate to Data Sharing, and enable Share your indoor data for research.
As a thank you for contributing, participants will earn points through our upcoming Clean Air Advocates Program.
We're still developing the details, but our intention is that these points can eventually be redeemed for rewards or donated to support clean air initiatives and community projects.
AirGradient has always been built around the idea that open data creates positive change.
By opting in, you're helping researchers answer important questions about indoor environments while contributing to a public resource that can benefit people around the world.
If enough of our community participates, we can create one of the world's largest open indoor air quality datasets - and together discover new ways to make the air we breathe indoors healthier for everyone.
Please consider opting in today.
