What PEIR is All About
You care about the environment and factor it into your daily choices. But how do you know if your decisions actually make a difference? Knowledge is power: PEIR lets you see how your daily choices affect the environment and how the environment affects you.
Personalized Feedback, Detailed Information
PEIR is an online service that interacts with your mobile phone to provide you with an environmental “scorecard” that tracks some of your effects on the environment and some of what you are exposed to as you go about your day.
When you log on to your PEIR profile you will see personalized daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries of four environmental impact and exposure scores: (1) Carbon emissions, (2) Impact on sensitive sites, (3) Fast food exposure, and (4) PM 2.5 (particulate) exposure. You’ll see a personalized trip log and explorer with this information for every trip you take–whether to work, the grocery store, or a night on the town.
You can view and map trips interactively to explore how your daily habits contribute to your overall scores. And PEIR is social; you can share your overall PEIR scores or trip log with other PEIR users or add the PEIR application to your Facebook profile to share and compare scores with your friends.
Inside PEIR
Although today’s mobile phones are impressive, they can’t directly measure carbon dioxide or particulate matter. 
PEIR uses GPS technology to determine the values indirectly. As you go about your routine — jogging, commuting, running errands — your mobile phone uses GPS and cell towers to record and upload your location every few seconds to your secure profile. Based on this location trace, the system infers your activity (walking, biking, driving, riding the bus) and logs it throughout the day.
PEIR maps this combination of location, time, and activity to regional air quality and weather data to calculate your personal carbon footprint and your exposure to fine particles (PM 2.5) in the air.
It also uses maps of sensitive sites (schools and hospitals) and food-related establishments (fast food, convenience stores, dine-in restaurants and grocery stores) in the same way to calculate the amount of particulates our mode of travel emits near sensitive sites and the number of fast food eateries you encounter in your day. This environmental information is derived from data gathered and maintained by government agencies and other scientific organizations.
You can find more details in the PEIR Science section.
The Importance of Transportation
The current set of impact and exposure factors built into PEIR relate strongly to transportation. While we plan to incorporate other factors in time, transportation is a great place to start because it not only factors in to so many environmental and personal health issues but because it is partially under our control.
PEIR is an experiment to look at how we can use timely information about environmental and health-related issues as we make the hundreds of small decisions that together add up to our overall behavior patterns and, ultimately, show the relationships between users and the community that surrounds them.
Sponsors and Project Team
PEIR draws from research in computer science, engineering, statistics, urban planning, environmental science, user interface design, and visualization. The project team includes researchers at UCLA and Nokia as well as the broader scientific community. Learn about our sponsors.
PEIR development has been under development for almost a year at UCLA, being designed and created by researchers in the urban sensing group at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Learn more out about our project team.
Join PEIR
PEIR has been designed for people who want to be more conscious of their personal impact and exposure on the environment. Currently, PEIR is private beta, but if you'd like to be notified when PEIR is open for new user registration, please sign up for e-mail alerts. We'll never spam. Promise.