It is sundown in a rural region of south India.
As night descends on a small village, a woman in a tattered sari sets fire to a composition of dung and firewood. Pulling a cell phone from her pocket, she takes a photo of a small circular filter darkened by soot and sends it off via text message.
Moments later, the measurements of the air pollutants produced from her crude stove are relayed back to her device from a centralized server.
This scientific feat was made possible by Nithya Ramanathan and her colleagues at the nonprofit company Nexleaf Analytics.
Ramanathan, who is president and founder of Nexleaf and an assistant research professor of computer science at UCLA, spoke on Wednesday as a part of the third annual Global Health Awareness Week.
This year’s theme is “Sustainable and Responsible Programs in Global Health.”
Ramanathan lectured on how mobile devices such as the one used in south India can be utilized as scientific data collection tools to measure populations and the environment.
“Cell phone network connectivity is everywhere,” she said. “Cell phones are always on and with us all the time.”
Ramanathan has used cell phone technology to address the problem of black carbon pollution.
In much of the developing world, people burn firewood, dung and crop residue for fuel. The burning of these biofuels spews black carbon into the atmosphere, said Paul Bunje, executive director of UCLA’s Center for Climate Change Solutions.
Black carbon, also known as soot, contributes significantly to global warming, Bunje said. Tiny particles of soot absorb heat in the atmosphere and reduce the ability to reflect sunlight when deposited on snow or ice.
Using mobile phones to monitor black carbon is an extremely cost-effective approach to understanding the problem, Ramanathan said. A standard black carbon filter costs $500, 10 to 100 times cheaper than similar instruments. In addition, these filters use very little power and can easily be repaired in the field.
“You don’t need a smart phone,” she said. “Many of the standard Nokia phones used in Asia and Africa will work with this.”
Ramanathan first thought of using cell phones as scientific data collection devices while working on a previous assignment with Deborah Estrin of UCLA’s Center for Embedded Network Sensing. The team had needed a low-cost, low-power solution to monitor arsenic levels in Bangladesh’s ground water.
In 2009, Ramanathan began working on Project Surya, an initiative sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme. Surya is intended to curb the effects of global warming by reducing the concentrations of black carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere.
In its first phase, the program targeted three regions in rural south India. In each of these regions, Project Surya provided cleaner-burning technologies such as solar-powered lamps and non-biofuel burning stoves, along with filters and mobile phone technology, to 5,000 households.
According to its website, Surya is currently developing a cap and trade program where villagers who adopt the clean-burning technology will be eligible for monetary returns.
Since black carbon does not last for long in the atmosphere, reducing its emissions will have an immediate effect on health levels worldwide, Bunje said.
“If we stop emitting black carbon today, it will disappear in a matter of months,” Ramanathan said.
Combined, black carbon, methane and ozone account for an estimated 30 to 50 percent of climate change from human activity.
According to the World Health Organization, black carbon is responsible for around 1.5 million deaths each year due to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases as well as lung cancer.
Most deaths are caused by indoor air pollution.
Reducing the emission of black carbon is not Ramanathan’s only mobile-based endeavor.
She is working on SoundProof, a mobile phone application that allows users to track noise levels in urban areas to enable researchers to investigate possible relationships between noise and health.
Another project, Neighborhood Senses, will allow members of a community to report levels of industrial pollution, such as the quality of water next to a local steel mill, according to Nexleaf’s website.
In the future, Ramanathan said she has plans to deploy mobile phone monitoring technology locally in Los Angeles.