"Imagine Windchimes data helping you plan your bike commute so that the wind is always at your back, tend to your urban farm using microclimate data or care for your asthmatic child with air-quality metrics," its designers ask.
"non-Hispanic blacks in the United States suffer worse air quality across multiple metrics, geographic scales, and multiple pollution metrics.
On the slides, we note cost of living, air quality, and other metrics and suggest great, walkable neighborhoods.
The presented approach provides an appealing tool for developing multipollutant metrics of air quality that can be used to support multipollutant health studies.
Although the availability of air quality data affected the selection of metrics in each study, presentation of results from multiple metrics would have mitigated this uncertainty for both risk assessors as well as those performing meta-analyses.
One of CBE's research projects, the Occupant Satisfaction Survey, uses an online survey to collect data regarding occupant satisfaction in relation to a variety of metrics (such as air quality, acoustics and lighting) in various buildings.
The development of multipollutant metrics of ambient air quality for investigating population-level health impacts is an open problem and thus there are many opportunities for future research.
An important point of discussion is if there is added value of using SOM versus more standard unsupervised approaches for developing multipollutant metrics of ambient air quality.
Other approaches for investigating pollutant mixtures include composite metrics such as air quality indices [ 1], hierarchical and k-means clustering [ 2, 3], supervised principal components analysis [ 4], groupings based on chemical properties of pollutants [ 5], source apportionment [ 6], and exposure to specific mixtures, such as traffic-related pollutants [ 7].
Lastly, composite metrics, such as the Air Quality Index (AQI) proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency EPAA), might be used to explore health impacts of air pollution.
