Kickstarter Project Plans to Measure Beijing Pollution Using Kite Sensors

Thanks to the folks over at China Digital Times for pointing out this great Kickstarter project that aims to help measure Beijing’s air quality using air quality modules mounted on kites. The project is developed by a pair of students and is called FLOAT Beijing.

The project is slowly approaching its goal of $2500 on Kickstarter, with about $2000 raised as I write this, and only six days remaining. The students describe their efforts so far in the project description:

We have received funding for project materials from the Black Rock Arts Foundation and we’ve come a long way with the kite prototype, finding an old kitemaster from Henan who has been making kites in Beijing for the past 15 years, establishing locations for workshops and kite flights. We’re excited for the upcoming workshops in August, but we need a bit more help to allow for more local residents to partake in the project.

The American Embassy in Beijing has been conducting its own readings and publishing them to its @BeijingAir Twitter account. As you might expect, the Chinese government is not too happy about this, but hopefully if more and more people get involved with taking pollution readings, then perhaps it might pressure the authorities to be more transparent with its own readings.

Readers of this blog may remember a similar project from Japan called Safecast, which in the wake of last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan, developed geiger counters to help collect and share radiation data. Safecast was featured in an AP story earlier this week, and we encourage you to read that.

The FLOAT project is certainly an interesting one, and I wonder if such an initiative might benefit from cooperation with local hackerspaces, assuming they aren’t involved already. Amid all our usual stories of internet startups, VC funding, and all that jazz, I think that civic initiatives like these are really awesome too, and certainly deserving of attention.

For more information on FLOAT, check out their promo video below.