Would you like to know more about the air quality in your neighbourhood? Whether you live in highly-polluted Delhi or in idyllic Mysuru, the information on what you breathe is, now, on your fingertips.

A Gurugram-based start-up Blue Sky Analytics (BSA) has launched an App, BreeZo, which would help you decide whether to put on that N-95 mask before you step out of home.

The App, which is downloadable on both Android phones and iPhones, provides real-time data on air pollution at 200 geographical locations across the country. "We use air quality data available from monitors put up by public funded organisations and analyse them to give information on air quality to people," said Abhilasha Purwar, an IIT Varanasi alumnus who together with her brother Khitij Purwar founded the start-up.

Along with the data available from these sensors, the firm also uses imaging data available from satellites to make it more reliable. BSA is also making air quality information available through chatbots on WhatsApp and Facebook messenger for quick access for those who do not want to download the App and use it, even though it is free.

Besides, the platform offered by the geospatial data intelligence, the start-up makes it possible for the users to compare air quality data in two different geographical locations or between two different time periods. "We have historical data available from 2006 onwards," said Purwar, who also studied at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in the United States (US).

"To make an informed decision, evaluate various courses of action, and lead smart environmentalism, we need better environmental intelligence. Blue Sky provides the environmental data, starting with air in 2019, water in 2020, and land and heat in 2021, by crunching large volumes of data sets from satellites and various IoT devices, processing them through our proprietary machine learning algorithms,” she said.

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