EPA's SmokeSense

US Environmental Protection Agency

About this app

The Smoke Sense mobile app is designed to pilot a citizen science study about the impacts of wildfire smoke exposure on health. Citizen scientists can use the app to learn about wildland fires and smoke health risks in their area. They can report their health symptoms, and the range of actions they are able or willing to take to improve their health condition or lower their exposure. Users will earn badges each week they participate.
If successful, data gathered through Smoke Sense will help EPA researchers and communities determine how smoke impacts our health and productivity and gain important insights needed to develop health risk communication methods during smoke days.
The findings from the study will be peer-reviewed for scientific publication and published on the EPA website. Public health officials and air quality managers can use the results to develop strategies to protect public health from wildland fire smoke.
The pilot will be conducted during the 2017 wildland fire season until the end of October. At the end of the study , the Smoke Sense app will go offline temporarily for updates. Smoke Sense app user identities will be anonymous and non-identifiable.
Download and learn more about the Smoke Sense App at – https://www.epa.gov/air-research/smoke-sense

Ratings and reviews

Hint on map: If I turn off ALL layers I can manipulate map, THEN I turn on layers to see them. Map freezes otherwise. Map layers menu non standard (ignores back button) tap title to close. Dev suggestion: Load map with no layers then allow user to load. The whole app is still clunky. Lacks readings history or graph. The "observations" section needs English consistency improvements. Old review:Their website is so great (but hard for phones) I was surprised by how poor both their apps are.

Agree with others about the operability of the app. Even with patience the app freezes on a Samsung Note 8 with196GB of memory with plenty to spare. It took a while for the map to render from a simple graphics file to a more detailed, realistic presentation. Could be the app itself is overloaded with program coding to be easily useful on a phone. This note is written after the September 01, 2020 update. Given the raging fires here in WA State and our local in the Seattle area, we wanted an app that provided some measure of air quality for us and our neighbors. Hopefully the authors of the app will find a resolution to the issue.

Good idea, but there are a ton of issues with the app. It always quits out whenever I click "what can I do", half the time it doesn't have the menu options in the bottom right, and when I pop up the map options to select/unselect stuff, there's no down button so the menu stays in front of the map. The smoke layer doesn't load half the time

What's new

Adjusted the map and its default layers.
Updated frameworks and various bug fixes.