EASIER: Air-Quality Alerts for At-Risk Homes

Poor indoor air quality harms the people least equipped to detect it — older residents of under-resourced homes, often with respiratory conditions and without smart-home infrastructure. EASIER (Elders Alert System About Imminent Environmental Risks) asked what an affordable, deployable answer looks like.

The platform’s design constraint was pragmatism: off-the-shelf AWAIR air-quality monitors, Android tablets as in-home displays, backup wireless access points and batteries for unreliable connectivity, and a central server coordinating monitoring and alerts. The architecture — designed by then-master’s student Bryce Bible as his thesis work — emphasized graceful degradation: homes stay protected even when connectivity drops.

The system was developed within TVA’s Connected Communities environmental-justice initiative under the pilot “Alerting Elders to Air Quality Health Risks,” with an interdisciplinary team spanning engineering, public health, climatology, and social work. A first-authored paper appeared at ACM/IEEE CHASE 2023, and the full design is documented in the 2024 master’s thesis.