Location Based Sensing for Health Diagnoses: A Prototype for Personalized Pollen Profiling

Abstract

Personalized information and forecasts of environmentally triggered medical symptoms are becoming more and more critical, since the numbers of patients suffering from environmentally induced symptoms is still increasing (e.g. allergy or asthma patients). This project aimed at developing a solution to enable gathering personalized pollen exposure information and mapping this information with geospatial data from the personal habitat. This enables personal forecasts based on geospatial information and, when distributed to other suffering individuals, gives them the possibility of avoiding harmful environments. Within an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the medical, engineering, and geoinformatics professions, a system was developed to gather, qualify, and quantify aeroallergen particles (pollen), monitor additional climate parameters, and map this information, together with geospatial information, to the daily habitat of a single individual.