CIVIC-PG Track A: Smart Kids and Cool Seniors

This project helps low-income seniors cope better with the compounding threats of heat stress, poor air quality, and poor ventilation in public housing. It is a collaboration between the urban community of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and researchers at Rutgers University. Poverty imposes multiple stressors that limit opportunities for youth and increase cumulative environmental health risks for vulnerable people. Solutions should empower these people and members of the broader community to act more effectively. Thus, the project brings seniors and youth together for a common purpose in a STEM education program for disadvantaged youth in public housing. The youth and their university collaborators will deploy an inexpensive sensor network to measure environmental conditions outdoors throughout the city, and indoors in seniors’ apartments, and will share insights based on the data collected with community members in real time so that they can act accordingly. This project should build a firmer basis for (1) residential actions to avoid exposure to heat stress and poor air quality, (2) community group actions to advocate for regulation of prominent outdoor air polluters and an indoor right to cooling, (3) municipal actions to prioritize civic improvements, and (4) housing authority actions to improve environmental conditions within apartment buildings. The project deploys a large number of inexpensive, moderate-quality air pollutant and temperature/humidity measurement sensors in a network with real-time remote data retrieval at a grid of fixed points, augmented with mobile sensors—personal exposure monitors—carried by youth accompanying seniors on their normal trips around the city. The university research team will create a modeling platform that monitors sensor performance, interpolates local environmental conditions based on the sensor data, compares outdoor and indoor conditions, and pushes actionable information and recommendations to residents by means of cellphone apps, a local-access TV channel, and video displays being installed off-budget in stairwells buildings owned by the housing authority. This platform will serve a community engagement process that brings youth and seniors together around the common goals of reducing seniors’ cumulative environmental vulnerabilities and increasing children’s exposure to STEM knowledge. The project: (1) focuses on human agency in the multi-level urban context; (2) applies machine learning techniques to help solve budgeting tradeoffs between sensor quality and coverage; (3) extends digital twinning strategies to handle both indoor and outdoor problem solving; and (4) empowers communities to identify realistic improvements.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.