Gaia

Team Name

Gaia

Team Members

Project Description

When dealing with green resources, a large majority of the population are blind to the average daily usage. Many households around Australia waste power and water on a daily basis. Gaia, an interactive phone app, allows the average person to not only record and monitor their daily resource expenditure, but also receive rewards for staying under average household consumption using a points scheme.

This multipurpose app aims to allow anybody to access a range of important information. This is not only limited to the water and energy usage goals, but also air quality data and information on government grants and rebates throughout the state of Queensland. In conjunction with the UnityWater fleet, pollution sensors be attached to vehicles to monitor air quality levels throughout Queensland, providing data on PM10, PM2.5 and CO2 levels and flagging whenever it is unsafe to spend long periods of time in many areas. Through these processes we hope to be able to impact the ESG initiatives in a positive manner.

Goals:
Increase awareness in water and electricity use throughout Queensland and incentivize them to be lowered
Monitor air quality levels throughout Queensland to supplement necessary data in many regions
Health awareness and long term safety
Public participation in all related events

Roadblocks:
Potential lack of user participation
lack of partners willing to sponsor the project
Equipment and application bugs and errors

Recommendations:
The plan to add sensors to the UnityWater vehicles should be expanded to council vehicles, AusPost vehicles, and the vehicles of partnered businesses.
The app could be expanded to include other utilities such as garbage bins.
The app could include new data from the UnityWater vehicles tracking air quality so it's easy to see the air quality around the user's location.

Tools used:
App design: proto.io
Video: powtoon.com
Video narration (AI text-to-speech): NaturalReader
AI assistance for developing the app and processing data: ChatGPT 3.5
Data processing & visualisation: MATLAB
Location data: Google maps API
Logo design: Adobe Free Online Photo Editor

Data Story

Most people go through their lives never bothering to understand how and why their house uses resources. Water comes out of a tap and the power is supplied by a power point. Air is healthy and the government rebates appear an age away.

Gaia aims to draw attention to these seemingly unnecessary details, and in doing so save water and power, help emphasize hazardous areas, and raise awareness of government efforts to support the community.

When users of Gaia meets daily usage objects or participate in environmentally friendly activities they will gain SustainaPoints, useful for discounts in local businesses and water and power bill cash backs.