A Smoke Heatmap Overlay for Wildfires to Inform Risk and Track Associated Symptoms

As wildfires proliferated in the summer of 2020, it became apparent that tracking environmental impacts of incidental events such as smoke resultant from wildfires, besides daily impacts was important for vulnerable populations and that understanding the risks associated with ground-level smoke as well as atmospheric level smoke would be important in the future. While ground-level smoke risks are more readily understood, atmospheric-level smoke risks are less visible, posing an invisible threat to vulnerable populations.

We wanted to present risks visually leveraging our Community Symptoms Map that could display the dispersion paths for each of ground- and atmospheric level smoke, but we also wanted to create a model for recognizing a symptom that is recorded when a user is within those dispersion paths. This would show the user, over time, the prevalence of symptoms when an incidental event like wildfire smoke was present in their community. Our feature, called SHOW, for Smoke Heatmap Overlay for Wildfires, is a visual risk support for the user, but it’s also a RWE model for correlating wildfire smoke with symptoms or by tracking over time the user’s potential deterioration in health and well-being by repeated exposures to wildfire smoke.

DailyBreath, LLC is a cloud-based SaaS company delivering personalized environmental insights to empower individuals and communities to anticipate and take action to reduce or avoid acute symptoms impacted by air quality as a result of changing climate and weather conditions. Available as a free mobile app, available on the App Store and via Google Play, DailyBreath demonstrates the value of climate, weather, and environmental science applied to real-world scenarios that improve human health and resilience and, in some cases, save lives. It also shows how climate and weather information adds value to individualized health monitoring, condition management and control, and preventative measures.

At the community and commercial level, DailyBreath’s data store, risk indices, and AI/ML algorithms can help public and private industry healthcare decision-makers better respond to at-risk segments of the population with policies and action plans that reduce pollution, improve warnings and notifications, and address other air quality issues.

DailyBreath was one of three companies selected to represent Virginia, among a total of 153 selected to represent the US in Google’s 2022 #weareplay contest. Visit g. co/play/weareplay-usa for the story.