Interacting with Invisible Pollutants with Augmented Reality and CoWear Wrist-band
CoWear platform leverages Wearable technology and Augmented Reality (AR) to transform indoor carbon-dioxide (CO2) monitoring into a real-time, engaging, actionable, and personalized experience, promoting healthier living environments.
Key Features
Uniqueness: This study uniquely integrates wearable technology with augmented reality (AR) to transform indoor air quality management. By using a wrist-worn CO2 sensor and a smartphone AR application, it offers real-time, personalized pollution monitoring. The system visually represents CO2 levels as interactive AR bubbles, making invisible pollutants tangible and actionable. This approach not only enhances user engagement through intuitive visualization and a game mechanic but also promotes immediate behavioral change for healthier indoor environments.
- Wearable Technology Integration: Combines a wrist-worn CO2 sensor with a smartphone-based AR application for real-time, personalized exposure monitoring.
- AR Visualization: Utilizes AR to render invisible CO2 as interactive, color-coded bubbles in the user's immediate environment, making abstract data tangible.
- User-Centric Interaction: Focuses on user-centered design, enabling individuals to directly engage with and mitigate pollution through AR-mediated feedback.
- Behavioral Change through Gaming: Introduces an AR game that motivates users to implement ventilation strategies, turning mitigation into an engaging activity.
- Empirical Validation: Evaluated across semi-controlled and real-world environments, demonstrating the system's effectiveness in raising awareness and promoting healthier indoor environments.
- Real-Time Personal Exposure Monitoring: Allows individuals to track their CO2 exposure throughout the day, aiding in personal health management.
- Environmental Education: Provides an engaging tool for educational purposes, teaching users about indoor air quality and effective ventilation strategies.
- Workplace Health Management: Facilitates healthier office environments by offering employees a means to monitor and control air quality, increasing productivity.
- Smart Home Integration: Could be integrated with smart home systems, optimizing indoor conditions for occupant health and comfort.
Licensing:The platform source and the collected data is free to download and can be used with
GNU Affero General Public License for non-commercial purposes. All participants signed forms
consenting to the use of collected pollutant
measurements and activity labels for non-commercial research purposes. The institute’s ethical review
committee has approved the field study (Order No: IIT/SRIC/DEAN/2023, Dated July 31, 2023).
Contributors
Prasenjit Karmakar
IIT Kharagpur, India
Manjeet Yadav
IIT Jodhpur, India
Swayanshu Rout
RGIPT, India
Swadhin Pradhan
Cisco Systems, US
Sandip Chakraborty
IIT Kharagpur, India
Teaser Video
Publications
- Karmakar, P., Yadav, M., Rout, S., Pradhan, S. and Chakraborty, S., From Invisible to Actionable: Augmented Reality Interactions with Indoor CO2. ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), 2026