Ashesi University Computer Science students partnered with researchers from University of California, Berkeley to conduct air quality studies around Accra. Outfitted with a portable Global Positioning System (GPS) and devices that tracked SO4 and CO2, students traveled around Accra recording amounts of these two harmful gasses at locations around the city. At the end of every day the data was uploaded to a central computer and analyzed to give a map of daily pollution levels around the city.
The study was organized by RJ Honicky a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and Eric Paulos at Intel Research. The research project named Networked Suite of Mobile Atmospheric Real Time Sensors (N-SMARTS) aims to build a large scale, distributed scientific instrument for characterizing society's relationship to its environment, using environmental sensors embedded in location aware mobile phones.
Student, Samuel Boateng Asumadu stated, "My participation in this project has reformed my perception on the pollution levels of Accra. In fact, I previously thought pollution was minimal. After witnessing the high concentration of Carbon Monoxide recorded by my equipment however, I began to take air pollution more seriously."