AQWidget – Breeze Technologies develops open source air quality information widget for European Commission’s JRC

Communicating understandable air quality data to citizens is a key ingredient for effective clean air action. They need to be able to understand why air quality is important, how air quality levels have been developing and what the local authorities want to do to avoid air pollution. “One of the key issues that people tell us about again and again is the difficulty in getting local pollution data in the first place, and then to understand the scientific and technical terminology,” says Haris Sefo, Head of Science at Breeze Technologies.

This is why we are particularly happy to release AQWidget, an interactive air quality widget for air quality data communications. Following a call for proposals of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, Breeze Technologies was selected to develop an application that would make it easier for municipalities and organizations to communicate real-time air quality data via their websites. Key focus of the creation of AQWidget was simplicity. “We wanted to create a tool that would make air quality really easy to understand,” says Robert Heinecke, Breeze Technologies’ CEO, “AQWidget also works beautifully with our air quality citizen portal that could be a second engagement step for citizens, providing more information.”

AQWidget can be embedded into any website and can be set to display real-time air quality data from any of the European Union’s air quality monitoring stations. It has been released on Github as an open source project under the EUPL. This means that the software can be used for free by any organisation.