Name: 【TED】Romain Lacombe: A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing (A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing | Romain Lacombe)
Uploaded: 2019-05-17T03:45:49.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

that climate change is an information issue

I went from data science to climate policy research,

to avoid the wasted energy, resources, opportunities

Until one day, running in the streets with a friend, it hit me:

whose emissions are wrecking our climate over time

that threaten our health right here and right now.

All this time I'd focused on the long-term environmental risk

about the immediate health impact of pollutants in the air.

Air pollution is a burning public health crisis.

It kills seven million people every year,

it costs five trillion dollars to the world economy

and, worst, it robs us of our most precious gift,

six months of life expectancy in my hometown of Paris

and up to three, four, five years in parts of India and China.

And in the US, more people die from car exhaust than from car accidents.

So how do we protect ourselves from pollution?

The reason it's difficult is an information gap.

We simply lack the data to understand our exposure.

And that's because the way we monitor air quality today

is designed not to help people breathe but to help governments govern.

Most major cities operate networks of air-quality monitoring stations

to decide when to cut traffic or when to shut down factories.

And these machines are like the computers from the '60s

They're incredibly precise but incredibly large,

so much that you can only deploy just a few of them,

So to governments, air pollution looks like this.

up to eight times within a single city block.

So unless you happen to be walking right next to one of those stations,

they just cannot tell you what you breathe.

So what would environmental protection look like

if it was designed for the age of the smartphone?

my team and I have been building a technology

Flow is a personal air-quality tracker that you can wear with you

that monitor the most important pollutants in the air around you,

or particulate matter that gets into your bloodstream

the thousands of chemicals in everyday products

and helps you understand what you're breathing

by telling you where and when you've been exposed to poor air quality,

and that way you can make informed decisions

You can change the products you use at home,

you can find the best route to cycle to work,

you can run when pollution is not peaking

and you can find the best park to bring your children out.

Over time you build better habits to decrease your exposure to pollution,

will also contribute to mapping air quality in their city.

we sent early prototypes of our technology to 100 volunteers in London,

So our goal now is to scale this work around the world,

to crowdsource data so we can map air quality on every street,

and to empower citizens, civic leaders, policy makers

to support clean-air policies for change.

It took decades of lung cancer research and second-hand smoking studies,

but eventually, we reached a tipping point and we passed smoking-ban laws.

We must reach the same tipping point for air quality and I believe we will.

governments have fined carmakers record amounts

Cities have passed congestion charges or built bike lanes --

【TED】Romain Lacombe: A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing (A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing | Romain Lacombe)

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Romain Lacombe: A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing (A personal air-quality tracker that lets you know what you're breathing | Romain Lacombe)

incredibly

crisis

unprecedented

precious