Sustainability Analysis

The research work and results presented in the previous sections of this thesis have been developed as part of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree for Pervasive Computing and Communications for Sustainable Development (PERCCOM) program (Kor et al., 2019). This program makes an emphasis on the sustainability aspects of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects, hence it is very important to state the sustainability analysis of this work. But first, it is important to define sustainability and its connection to the ICT environment.

A widely accepted definition of sustainable development was first mentioned in the Brundt-land Report (BrundtBrundt-land et al., 1987). The definition reads, that something can be considered sustainable if “it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Today’s way of doing business is going the opposite di-rection. We, as a society, are vastly prioritizing short-term economic growth for the enrichment of a few people and are neglecting the dangerous consequences towards the environment that these can bring. It is the same in the ICT area, where projects and companies prioritize their economic performance over their impact on the environment. Therefore, a thorough screen-ing must be done at the conception of every ICT project in order to minimize the impact of the out-coming product on the health of the environment and people depending on such health.

To understand this impact of this project we utilize a tool described in (Duboc et al., 2019). It consists of a five-pillar scheme, in which each pillar represents a field of our societal mesh on which the project can have an impact. Each field can be affected by three different levels of effects, a structural effect, an enabling effect and an immediate effect. The pillars and their effects on this outdoor air prediction project are the following:

1. Economic: A structural effect on the economic area is that by making air pollution lev-els public, the mitigation of their emissions will take more importance over economic growth during important decisions, due to transparency and consciousness of the com-munity (seen as a chain effect from the social pillar). The availability of forecasted AQ levels can enable companies to make decisions to mitigate their impact and avoid fines, having an enabling effect on from the project and laying the foundations for more trans-parency. Finally, as an immediate effect, citizens will be able to avoid polluted areas in cities leading to less health complications and their expenses on medicines and med-ical attention will drop, having a positive economic impact for them. This last effect is triggered by the individual immediate effect of users avoiding polluted areas.

2. Technical: Context-aware systems allow new data sources and prediction algorithms to

be seamlessly added to the platform, depending on everyone’s needs, enabling more customizable content for citizens, co-enabling better decisions for businesses for sus-tainable objectives and an overall awareness of the environment (as presented by the structural effect in the environment pillar). As an immediate effect, we take the avail-ability of a developed system that extends the context for AQ levels predictions.

3. Environmental: a clear structural effect on the environment is that individuals, organi-zations and governments are more aware of the impact that each has on the AQ and can, thus, make more informed eco-friendly decisions.

4. Individual: users can be prevented from going to hazardous areas, with high air pollu-tion levels, by receiving constant and personalized updates on AQ. But not everything has a positive effect for end-users, because they could develop a dependability on the system that can reduce their ability to decide and listen to their own intuition. Constant paranoia can arise from the dependence of users; so the application should be able to show confidence levels on the predicted and monitored values, to leave space for peo-ple’s common sense. Finally, as a more structural effect, individuals can demand better policies and regulations from authorities, given that they have access to the same trans-parent information, enabled by the social effect of communities knowing the sources of pollution.

5. Social: communities will know the pollution levels and performance on their living ar-eas, they can share the effects on how these levels affect each of them and demand better managing of AQ from their communal authorities. This pillar is tied closely to the previous one and enabled by transparency from governments and businesses.

The whole impact of this work on the afore mentioned pillars can be clearly seen in Figure 5.15.

5.4 Summary

In this chapter, the setup for the experiments that prove the theoretical work of previous sec-tions is described, as well as the required datasets and information used in their execution.

Then, the obtained results and outcomes of the system are presented, which showed promis-ing values and improvements for context-aware systems. Lastly, the performed sustainability analysis proved that the proposed approach can provide benefits to important sectors of to-day’s society if applied correctly. In the next section, conclusions are drafted for all the work

Figure 5.15: Sustainability analysis in the economic, technical, environmental, indi-vidual and social pillars of this work.

presented in this thesis, some limitations encountered in the planning and execution process are mentioned and potential future work in this topic is discussed.