Back in the day, pigeons were used to carry handwritten messages from one place to another. Well now, they’re tweeting air quality. In its efforts to combat pollution, IoT startup Plume Labs equipped 10 birds with tiny sensor-equipped, AVR-powered backpacks to monitor nitrogen dioxide, ozone and volatile compounds throughout London.
All of these sensors and a GPS unit only weigh 25 grams, so the pigeons have no problem staying airborne. To see just how toxic their area of the city may be, people simply could tweet @PigeonAir until Wednesday, March 16th. What’s more, it’s also possible to view the pigeons’ flight movements and whereabouts on a real-time map.
The idea was originally submitted by DigitasLBi’s Pierre Duquesnoy and Matt Daniels as part of Twitter’s #PoweredbyTweets competition, with hopes of raising awareness to London’s pollution problem which happens to kill nearly 9,500 people each year.
The so-called “Pigeon Air Patrol” is merely a three-day pilot, though, as the campaign’s ultimate goal is to encourage city dwellers to become beta testers for a wearable, human version of Plume Labs’ latest air quality monitoring platform. Regardless, this is certainly an innovative way to highlight the impact of pollution in an accessible and tangible way.