Ambient Environment and Room Weather

Topic Infobox
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Tracking the ambient environment can include a number of parameters and metrics that can be useful for different personal research questions. There are a variety of ways of collecting some of these parameters.

Ambient "Weather"

Literally weather category. Can be used to tell if user is outdoors and compare to recorded weather.

Potential things to track

CDC tracks a lot of data. Some of it is useful to continuous health tracking like AQI. Also contains lots of data & visualization.

Light

Light intensity can be measured in lumens. Advanced sensors may measure the spectrum as well. This can relate to topics related to tanning or light therapy, as insufficient light may cause depression and lead to a lack of vitamin D. It can also affect sleep in various ways.

Temperature

This can refer to either the experienced weather outdoors or the indoor/room temperature.

Other parameters:

• Pressure
• Humidity

How to track these parameters

For keeping track of outdoor data it can be possible to access historic data from a variety of sources if you have your geolocation data.

For indoor data collections a variety of indoor/outdoor weather stations exist that can collect parameters such as temperature, pressure and humidity. One example would be the Netatmo weather stations.

Noise and sound levels

Keeping track of noise levels can be of interest as increased noise levels have been linked to physiological and psychological health issues and can impair things like sleep. Some tools such as the netatmo weather stations keep track of indoor noise levels over time. Furthermore later models of the Apple Watch record noise levels at regular intervals.

Air Quality

Keeping track of air quality, both indoors (IAQ) and outdoors are a frequent topic of interest.

Parameters

• carbon dioxide (CO₂)
• oxygen (O₂)
• volatile organic compounds (VOC)
• PM10 (Particulate Matter)
• PM2.5
• PM1
• nitrogen dioxide (NO₂)

Some indoor weather stations keep track of CO₂ levels, furthermore there are some mobile, commercial air quality monitors such as the Plume Labs Flow. Researchers are always making new devices that are not available to the market yet.

Other ambient environment topics

Beyond these there are parameters such as magnetic fields and forces which could be of potential interest.