Tag: digital strategy

Exploring Hounslow’s Air Quality Data

Why Air Quality matters?

It is a known fact that poor air quality is unhealthy to all of us, especially for vulnerable groups such as people with medical conditions such as heart issues or asthma, as well as children or the elderly with breathing difficulties. Air quality is not the same everywhere. In other words: pollution can build up in pockets and we call them “hot spots” and potential reasons for these occurring are that they are close to a busy road or near a commercial or industrial zone. Prevailing weather conditions are another contributory factor that impacts air quality measures. So, it is important to us all to monitor air quality regularly, identify troublesome “hot spots”, and ensure that we are using this information to help guide actions and policies focused on ensuring cleaner air for us all.

What do we know about Air Quality in Hounslow?

London Borough of Hounslow partners with Ricardo Energy & Environment who maintain 6 Air Quality monitoring sites across the borough. As well as these sites, there are also third-party monitoring stations like Breathe London. Live stations provide hourly data which hold key measurements of specific pollutants within the air. The current list of live monitoring stations is as below:

  • Brentford
  • Chiswick
  • Feltham
  • Gunnersbury
  • Hatton Cross
  • Heston

Quick understanding of Air Quality measures (Pollutants)

Do you know that air is mostly gas? Air is actually comprised of a mixture of different gases like Nitrogen (approx. 78%), Oxygen (21%) and the remaining approx. 1% hold lots of other gases in the earth’s atmosphere (NASA). The UK Government has provided a national legislation and standards on air quality that identifies key pollutants in the air, like Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Particulate Matter up to 10 micrometres in size (PM10), Small Particulate Matter under 2.5 micrometre in size (PM2.5), Nitric Oxide (NO), Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) and Ozone (O3).

How can data science support a ‘data-enabled decision making’ process?

The role of data science brings in a deep lens to interpret data with a new dimensions and opportunities. With the use of key data science technologies like Python and R, you can filter out answers in seconds. At the London Borough of Hounslow, the Data Science & Quality Team have been working on air quality data sets generated during the last 10 years, where we have learned and identified valuable insights such as, seasonal changes impacting the hot spots’ live feeds, last 10 years comparison between hot spots and its performance to gather data, correlating pollutants with each other, correlating data with 3rd party monitoring stations, engineering and deploying machine learning models for predictive insights and utilising cloud technologies for rapid outcomes for data-enabled decision making.

During our data science work, we have learned so many facts and picked up patterns based on air quality data insights, do you know that during winter season pollutants concentration within the air stays longer than summer because cold air is denser and moves slower than warm air. The image below explains last 10 years of seasonal recordings within Hounslow.

data visual for Air Quality and its pattern during seasonal changes.
Air Quality Pollutants / Visual covering yearly seasons

What can we do in future?

The Data Science & Quality Team regularly meets Environmental & Public Health colleagues and are working on future initiatives for the cleaner air in Hounslow. One of the future initiatives is to correlate past 10 years of air quality data against the public health’s respiratory datasets. This initiative will bring in new dimensions and thoughts to build on.

If you have an idea / suggestion to share or to correlate Hounslow’s Air Quality data against your datasets, then please do approach us.

Hounslow’s new Community Hub call centre

As part of the Council’s response to the coronavirus we had to set up a new call centre for the Community Hub. The aim of the hub is to ensure that assistance is directed to the most vulnerable in the Borough. Whilst we were trying to estimate the volume of phone calls we might receive into the centre, it quickly became apparent that we may fall short of the capacity required. 

We discussed the issue with our Amazon Web Services account manager, Katie Blunt and by the next morning we’d had a call with AWS and VoiceFoundry.com along with an offer to stand up a dedicated call centre solution for us overnight. 

Our team were able to quickly pull together the details such as call routing design and estimates of call volumes and agents and began working with VoiceFoundry on implementing the solution. 

Amazon Web Services have provided the infrastructure for free and VoiceFoundry’s excellent team provided the commissioning work for free too. 

The solution is built on Amazon Connect and the call centre agent interface is browser based and extremely simple to use with nothing to install. 

We’ve received fantastic support from both AWS and VoiceFoundry.com to get this up and running and today we’ve gone live with the solution taking calls from the public.  Our sincere thanks to Katie at Amazon Web Services and to Daniel and Asad at VoiceFoundry.com for their support at this challenging time. 

We’ll also be looking next at integrating automated call answering using Amazon Lex conversational voice and text interfaces to further develop the solution and expand the capacity of the call centre team and extend the contact centre capabilities into the web. 

All part of our approach to the Digital Strategy.

Draft Digital Strategy

We want to hear from you about our draft digital Strategy.  We have been working with colleagues across the council to develop this important document to set the vision and direction for the Council.  How we are going to change our services to make the most of data and technology through making sure that we put communities at the centre of what we do. 

The strategy is going to the March cabinet. 

Tell us what you think