The Homebrew Sensing Project is working to develop a set of low-cost hardware and free software tools community members can use to measure local health data, such as air and water quality.

Communities are increasingly concerned about the array of hazardous chemicals that surrounds us, from formaldehyde in building materials to fumes from industrial sites, and their long and short term health impacts. To address this problem, Public Lab is working to provide more low-cost chemical analysis tools, including simple devices that can be plugged into smartphones and laptops, so residents can measure the effects themselves instead of relying on costly labs.

With its community of over 3,500 active members, Public Lab has distributed over 3000 affordable open source spectrometers to help people identify petroleum in sediments in coastal Louisiana and monitor emissions from oil refineries, among other projects.

Read more about our work here:

• https://spectralworkbench.org
• http://publiclab.org/wiki/spectrometer