According to various studies sponsored by the World Health Organisation, air pollution is the greatest environmental health threat of our time. While more and more communities around the world have started to collect air quality data with low-cost sensors, automated monitoring stations or satellites, the data is often not put to use.
As they face off against serious environmental problems, cities around the world are looking for ways to tackle air pollution, loud noise and bad road conditions. Elected and appointed officials in these jurisdictions know that these are not just annoying problems — they affect people’s health, property values, traffic flow and overall quality of life.
Traditional ways of checking air and noise levels — like fixed monitoring stations — provide a general picture for a whole city. But they miss the differences from one street to another, which are often the most important for everyday choices.
This lack of detailed data is a big issue for many sectors. For example, health apps can’t give safe advice to runners or people with asthma without knowing the exact air quality in each area. City planners also need accurate, local data to design green spaces or plan traffic better. Even real estate listings could benefit from showing how clean or polluted a specific neighbourhood is.
Mobile sensors offer a better way, but they’ve often been too basic or not reliable enough. One recently-developed option places high-quality sensors on moving vehicles. The core idea is quite simple: gather real-time data on air quality, road conditions, and noise — every few metres, all day long. This kind of system is not just an idea: it’s already working in some cities. It provides clear, street-level insights that help people, businesses and governments make smarter, healthier choices.
Scalability and impact
Since 2022, Swiss tech firm Sparrow Analytics has driven over one million miles, collecting more than a billion environmental measurements across more than 10 countries. This global expansion has demonstrated both the scalability and impact of its platform.
In Switzerland, Sparrow deployed its technology in the country’s top five cities, covering 640 zipcodes and more than 2.5 million people. Partnering with Swiss Post, Sparrow equipped delivery fleets with its mobile sensors – Sparrow Nodes - which are capable of measuring up to 50 different parameters while in motion.
This creates a dense, mobile sensor network and the initiative transformed environmental intelligence across Geneva, Zurich, Lausanne, Bern and Basel — revealing hyper-local pollution hotspots and enabling municipal authorities to take fast, data-driven action on traffic and air quality.
“Sparrow is now working with TomTom to integrate air pollution data into driver cockpit displays,” says Sparrow co-founder and COO Max Interbrick. “Drivers will see not only traffic delays but also real-time pollution exposure levels, helping sensitive individuals avoid high-risk areas and reducing overall traffic”.
“It's like giving cities an MRI instead of an X-ray”
Max Interbrick, Sparrow Analytics
In Belgium, the city of Antwerp leveraged Sparrow’s sensors through a collaboration with mobility services. Facing increasing public concern over urban pollution, Antwerp used the real-time data to pinpoint particulate concentrations and nitrogen dioxide spikes.
This empowered the city to implement smarter traffic flow strategies, adapt public warnings, and integrate air quality insights into local apps — significantly enhancing public health responsiveness . When asked about the impact of the company’s deployment of its technology inside Antwerp, Interbrick says: “After four months of deployment, Sparrow nodes revealed high NO2 levels in low-emission zones, despite traffic restrictions.
This particular insight led a local political party to propose new Friday closures, for better enforcement”.
Extreme conditions
In Israel, Sparrow conducted a ‘harsh device test’, whose aim was to push equipment to perform under extreme climate and terrain conditions. This validation helped improve the robustness of the Sparrow Node hardware for global deployments, ensuring reliable operation, whether it be in deserts or dense urban cores.
More recently, Sparrow launched its operations in New York City, not the most easy-going urban environment. In NYC, Sparrow Nodes are being integrated into fleets to create a high-resolution, real-time environmental map. That’s useful for mobility services, public health agencies and urban planners in any dynamic metropolis.
Sparrow now works to adapt its data platform to varying needs, infrastructures, and climates “while maintaining scientific accuracy and operational reliability”.
At the heart of Sparrow’s tech is the Sparrow Node proprietary mobile sensing device. Each one combines “high-grade sensors with real-time GPS and timestamp technology to collect data on multiple environmental parameters”, including:
● Air pollution: PM0.3-0.5, PM0.5-1-2.5-5, PM10, NO, NO₂, O₃, CO, CO₂, VOC
● Weather data: temperature, humidity, and pressure, altitude and speed
● Road quality: International Roughness Index (IRI) and surface defect vibration (SDV) metrics
● Noise pollution: real-time exposure and event detection
Each Sparrow Node is mounted on a vehicle using a magnetic, rugged design built for operation from -30°C to +50°C. As vehicles navigate their routes, data is collected every few seconds and transmitted via cellular networks to a cloud platform. The system is designed for reliability and low latency, using Rest-based APIs for seamless integration with third-party platforms.
‘Continuous calibration’
To ensure greater accuracy, Sparrow Nodes undergo “continuous calibration” against reference-grade instruments. This approach blends the coverage of mobile sensors with the reliability of stationary lab-grade monitors. The company developed multiple APIs — including address, zipcode, city and area – which enables tailored access by clients, from mobile app developers to public sector dashboards.
“What gets measured, gets managed: with SMMI, we are measuring more than ever before”
Davida Herzl, Aclima
The platform’s intelligence has been designed to get one step beyond mere data collection. Through machine-learning models, Sparrow analyses pollutant behaviours, detects anomalies and models future trends. This predictive power allows cities not just to react, but to plan ahead — forecasting exposure risks during events or high-traffic periods and aligning interventions with real-time needs.
Unlike traditional solutions that require massive infrastructure and lack real-time flexibility, Sparrow’s fleet-integrated system in a place like NYC enables coverage of the entire city with as few as 50 sensor-equipped vehicles.
Interbrick says that Sparrow represents a “leap forward” in environmental Data as a Service, bridging the critical gap between macro-level urban data and micro-level decision-making, with proven deployments in Switzerland and Belgium, a scalable tech platform, and a business model built on partnerships with delivery fleets and public vehicles,
Interbrick focused the company on its differentiation from other providers. “Most current air pollution monitoring relies on low-resolution simulations, based on sparse reference stations or limited static sensors,” he argues. “Sparrow changes that by using mobile sensors on public transport to deliver real-time, street-level data where people actually are. It's like giving cities an MRI instead of an X-ray”.
With its focus on roads, Sparrow enables what Interbrick calls “data-driven decisions” on transport, mobility and traffic-related air pollution. He says Sparrow helps customers – both cities and companies – to “drive real behavioural change”.
Other companies are pushing the envelope to develop new approaches. Two are worth noting here: Breeze Technologies and Aclima.
From its home base in California’s Silicon Valley, Aclima’s hardware and software technology platform “translates billions of scientific measurements from its network of roving sensors into environmental intelligence”.
Sources of air pollution
Last year, the influential State of California’s Air Resources Board (Carb) launched an innovative programme to enhance air quality monitoring across the state, with a heavy focus on communities where residents live near multiple sources of pollution.
The goal of this public/private partnership, dubbed the Statewide Mobile Monitoring Initiative (SMMI), is to get more data about the levels and sources of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that communities face.
Carb awarded a $27 million contract to Aclima to serve as SMMI’s core tech provider, with the funds provided by California Climate Investments. With this money Aclima is deploying a fleet of over 40 sensor-equipped vehicles to map air pollution at the neighbourhood level across 64 California communities.
The state government says this “is designed to provide real-time, block-by-block air quality data, especially in communities most affected by pollution, covering more than 950,000 miles and reaching 5.2 million residents”.
Aclima engineers three distinct components to its system:
• Vehicles are equipped with cutting-edge sensors that collect high-resolution data on dozens of pollutants every second as they drive through urban areas
• SMMI is guided by community input, with Community Air Monitoring Plans “developed in partnership with local organisations to ensure monitoring targets the areas of greatest need”
• Aclima’s collected data is made available to regulators and the public, “supporting transparency and empowering communities to take action”
Environmental decision making
Aclima says its mobile network delivers air quality data at the street level, revealing pollution differences that can vary up to eight times from one block to the next. The firm provides what it calls “an integrated platform—from data collection to analytics and public reporting—enabling actionable insights for cities, regulators, and residents”. SMMI routes were informed by environmental NGOs "engaged with local communities to identify areas and sites of most concern" (e.g. industrial plants, high-traffic corridors). As part of SMMI, they are being asked for very targeted data from community-led queries.
Aclima argues that most systems only measure a subset of major pollutants, which is not an adequate health indicator of air quality: “Unless people have the data, it is impossible for them to connect the dots on what is impacting the air they breathe.”
Davida Herzl, CEO and co-founder of Aclima, says the California project is “reimagining the role of technology in public service”. She adds: “Because ‘what gets measured, gets managed’. With SMMI, we are measuring more than ever before—in communities that have waited long enough and are not only finally being seen, they’re being heard, engaged, and helping lead the way. This is not a top-down programme. It’s an unprecedented partnership among government, business, and research institutions.”
“One of our city partners was able to improve air quality by approximately 70%”
Robert Heinecke, Breeze
Of course, Aclima is not the only enterprise trying to make a difference in cities. According to Robert Heinecke, founder and CEO of German firm Breeze, its technologies “enable cities to implement data-driven environmental management processes, with particular focus on air quality”.
Breeze develops lower-cost environmental sensors as well as an environmental decision-making support platform: “Cities deploy our sensors to collect environmental data on a much more hyperlocal scale than before, for instance air quality data on a block-by-block and street-by-street level.”
In 2021 the company launched the InterLuft air quality monitoring project, with money from the German Federal Ministry for Transportation and Infrastructure (BMVI)’s mFund, which promotes R&D projects looking at digital data-based mobility applications.
Breeze has also worked with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) in California on deployment of wildfire and air quality sensors – and put in place Germany’s first fully-automated, air quality-based wildfire detection system in Blankenburg.
The company’s technologies are deployed in 11 countries with partner companies, including Microsoft, NTT, SAP, Miele and Deutsche Telekom, and it is piloting what it calls a “citizen portal for air quality data”.
Breeze takes what Heinecke says is an “AI-first approach, turning data into action”.
“Leveraging our environmental AI, we provide clean air action recommendations based on the past successes and failures of clean air actions globally. This way, we are able to provide forecasts of specific impacts of potential clean air actions”.
Efficiency and effectiveness
Decision-makers use Breeze’s Environmental Intelligence Cloud to receive a database of actions which, Heinecke argues, “greatly increases efficiency and effectiveness of clean air actions being implemented…. we are aiming at raising the efficiency and effectiveness of clean air actions by a factor of 10”.
Breeze uses collected data to provide action recommendations from a database of more than 3,500 solutions. The aim is to help customers learn from the successes and failures of their colleagues and predecessors, on a worldwide level.
Heinecke says: “After implementing Breeze Technologies' AI clean air action recommendations, one of our city partners was able to improve air quality by approximately 70%.”
Each of these three private companies – Sparrow, Aclima and Breeze - is providing real-time hyperlocal air quality data, and they share an important goal: helping urban residents and visitors, particularly those affected by higher pollution levels, to protect themselves.
With accurate information, and with action recommendations, they can avoid areas with higher levels of pollution, use masks and filters, and take other countermeasures. That can prevent health emergencies, and perhaps even save lives.
