aqi.thingsnode Open the map
A child on a hillside above a hazy valley of traffic and chimney smoke, facing a break of daylight between two mountains.

Breathe Safe Sri Lanka

The air children breathe,
measured and open.

Open the live map For schools

Why this is being measured

350,000

school children travel and study beside the Colombo district corridors being instrumented

10-15%

asthma prevalence among urban Sri Lankan schoolchildren, with wheeze tracking corridor exposure

+4.67%

paediatric asthma admissions for every 10 µg/m³ of PM2.5, in Sri Lanka's own hospital data

Prevalence and admission figures come from published Sri Lankan school and hospital studies. The exposure count is the school population along the five corridors in scope.

A Colombo traffic corridor at the morning school run: children in white uniforms on the verge beside stalled traffic and exhaust haze.

The corridors

Measured where the walk to school happens.

The Colombo district puts Sri Lanka's heaviest traffic corridors and its densest school populations on the same streets. Almost none of that exposure is measured at the point where a child meets it.

  • Fifteen corridor stations funded and scheduled for deployment
  • Fifteen more on the same five highest-emission corridors
  • Evidence aimed at the vehicle emission standards, Gazette 1738/37
A compact air-quality sensor station mounted on a roadside pole above traffic.

The network

Forty-five stations,
one open instrument.

Thirty new stations join the fifteen already funded — fifteen more on the corridors, fifteen inside school grounds. Every site runs the same open-hardware monitor, so a reading from one is comparable to a reading from any other.

  1. Stations45
  2. MonitorAirGradient Open Air
  3. MeasuredPM2.5, CO2, NOx/VOC
  4. ValidationCEA reference-grade BAM
  5. Link4G, buffered on device

The same monitor behind UNICEF's school air quality network in Lao PDR.

Sri Lanka AQI

  1. Good0–50
  2. Moderate51–100
  3. Slightly unhealthy101–150
  4. Unhealthy151–200
  5. Very unhealthy201–300
  6. Hazardous301–500
Sri Lankan schoolchildren in white uniforms on their way to school.

For schools

Fifteen of them go
inside the gate.

Playground and classroom air, not only the road outside. Siting runs through Magicbit, Thingsnode's sister company, already working with these schools on STEM education — so what is missing is the instrument, not the relationship.

  • An alert to the school when levels cross WHO guidance
  • Read alongside partner doctors and health officials
  • No cost to the school, during the grant and after it

Guidance is population-level and not medical advice.

A paediatric clinic waiting area in Sri Lanka.

The question underneath

Does the corridor outside change the child inside?

A cross-referencing engine reads corridor and classroom pollutant data against paediatric respiratory admissions, and returns a risk index specific to one school and the road beside it. As far as we can establish, no study in South Asia has joined corridor and classroom exposure to children's respiratory outcomes at this scale.

The admissions side is aggregate and anonymised: no record about any child, ever.

  1. Thirty new stations deployedMonth 3–4
  2. First validated risk index publishedMonth 6
  3. Threshold workshop with regulator, health and university partnersMonth 9
  4. Twelve-month open dataset and validation reportMonth 12

Open enough to be checked

Code

Apache 2.0

Front end, index library, ingestors and the backend fork.

Data

CC BY 4.0

Every station, every reading, with gap and calibration flags.

Hardware

Open Air

AirGradient's open-source monitor at all forty-five sites.

API

No key

The same endpoints this site is built on.

GET /api/v1/stations
GET /api/v1/stations/{id}/readings
GET /api/v1/export?format=csv