2.3 Smart Citizen Kit

The Smart Citizen Kit is an open hardware project that we developed in Fab Lab Barcelona. And basically what it does is capture information about the environment in the city and specifically in terms of noise pollution, air quality, temperature, humidity. And the aim of the project is to bring open tools for people to participate in the production of useful information in cities.

The Smart Citizen Kit is basically sound, temperature, humidity sensors and light sensors that actually are capturing this information, sending it to the microcontroller. Then the microcontroller sends it to the antenna. And the antenna sends it to the world. We have produced already more than 1,000 kits. Those kits have produced more than 300 million data points. One of the most important things is the social implications related on how people can relate with each other in a totally new way. Now what happens when your information has some value for someone else? For me, I put this example of the noise or it could be in the air quality.

You could say you live next to an airport and you can say that both the air quality and the noise is above the limits of the EU regulation. You put in hands of the people the tools to make some kind of claim on their rights, no? To live in a healthy environment. It's done through the empowerment of people. And I think that's maybe the most interesting part of the potentials of the project. The motivation of making it on an open hardware basis is that people can build on top of that. People can develop their own sensor boards and attach it to the existing sensor board. And we want to encourage that.

We want to encourage people to use the Smart Citizen and transform it into something meaningful and useful for them.