Belgian Air Quality App

Enhancing the Air Quality App for the Belgian Interregional Environment Agency

Over the last few years, 52°North has worked closely with the Belgian Interregional Environment Agency (IRCEL – CELINE) to develop the BelAir air quality app. This app provides interested citizens with information about several air quality parameters as well as an air quality index in Belgium. It can create time-dependent map visualizations and present historic changes of different air quality parameters as diagrams. A set of personalization functionalities (e.g. setting user-defined locations) allows the user to adjust the app to individual information needs. Additional push notifications  inform users of critical air quality situations.

The technical baseline for the BelAir app development is the Helgoland Toolbox. It aggregates different fundamental building blocks for creating

Sensor Web client applications. 52°North uses the Ionic framework to build and deploy the JavaScript-based implementation as an app for Android and iPhone platforms.

After a public release at the beginning of 2019, 52°North implemented several app optimizations during the course of the year. This included usability optimization based on feedback provided by design experts (e.g. re-design of menus and views as well as user workflows). Additional important work items comprised enhanced approaches for ensuring the correct understanding of the data provided by users, a new mechanism for delivering user notifications in the case of specific conditions, performance and scalability improvements, increased robustness, as well as upgrades of underlying libraries (a major Ionic upgrade in particular).