Ideas for Apps

Develop a carbon footprint calculator application where users can find information on how they can reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, the application could calculate the carbon footprint of various different activities.

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Maybe the application starts out and asks questions about your lifestyle. With this the user can see how much their carbon footprint is and suggestions on what they can do to reduce it. Some examples include, recycling, gardening, using less energy, etc. It could then show the user what their carbon footprint is if they implement some of the suggestions. It could also have a list of tips that are easy to do to help reduce your carbon footprint and some links to other resources for information, including the EPA website.

Develop a National Wildlife application using the smartphone GPS. The application would locate you and tell you which wildlife can be found in the area, including but not limited to endangered wildlife.

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While this would be especially helpful while in national parks or conservatories, the app would be a vital resource on poisonous snakes, insects, and other dangerous wildlife to lookout for on hikes and camping trips, with first aid advice and phone numbers for poison control. With regard to engendered species, the app will be a great resource for knowledge on which habitats to be careful not to disturb. It could also be used to share national park maps and audio tours of facilities, and give trash receptacle locations, water spigot locations, tent sites, and other important information.

Develop a game application that challenges users to designing the greenest city.

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This app could make it challenging to create the most sustainable city on the globe, where more bikers ride to work than car drivers, where most homes have solar panels or wind mills on their roofs, where all water used in parks is reclaimed and not fresh drinking water and where all factories make goods with less toxics and a smaller footprint. Create a game where you get points for being ‘greener’.

Create an application that can help a user determine how green a product is. Allow the user to see if the factory that makes the product is green. Determine if the company that owns the factory is green or not. This should allow users to evaluate how green products, factories, and companies are so consumers can make better informed decisions.

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In addition, the application could combine EPA data with data from other bureaus like Consumer Product Safety and Workplace Safety, so that users can see the big picture of which companies are responsible and which are not.

Create a geo-tagged pollution wiki – users may mark areas suspected to be contaminated with pollution using their cell phone. They can guess which type of pollution it is, the severity of it & post pictures of it. The pictures could be put into a pattern recognition (like facial recognition) program to identify possible types of pollution.

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After a certain number of postings, or after verification of the polluted spot by a government official, the EPA would be notified. All historical polluted spots will be added to this map. Users will be able to truly see what is affecting their local environment the most and now they will finally be able to get together and do something about it. Identification is the first step to recovery, so this app would be the ideal platform to ensure that identification efforts are not wasted.

These areas are probably unknown to the users and the government, so by providing a transparent platform for this information to be aggregated we will help ensure that nearly all environmental contaminations are known about.

Create an Occupant Emergency Planning (OEP) application that lists all emergency planning EPA personnel and contractors. This app would allow all headquarters personnel and contractors the ability to have current rosters of all of the various facility OEP volunteers. All OEP volunteers would be listed in this app.

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The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment. Our most important asset is our EPA personnel. “Environmental protection is about human protection. It’s about community protection. It’s about family protection”. Lisa P. Jackson.

Develop an application that displays EPA facts and science-based projects and accomplishments by location for place-based projects. “City of X is removing Y from (air, water) with EPA grant funds (technical support, etc.) which will reduce pollutant loads by Z” helped City of X remove Y from (air, water) discharge”

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Groundwork Anacostia is removing trash, restoring lands, creating community gardens and training youth in the skills needed for environment courtesy of partnership between Groundwork USA, the National Park Service, US EPA, etc.

Develop a mobile app that allows a user to identify a water body he/she is located near (or a specific one of interest). With the water body identified, the user would get information on the status of the water body – i.e. is it meeting standards or is it impaired? If it is impaired, what is the pollutant and what are the threats? is their a TMDL developed? Then a user can click further to find out what he/she can do to manage the pollution and to help to restore this water body.

The app would use many of the existing EPA datasets on impaired waters and TMDLs. In addition, a library of best management practices would have to be compiled for the “how I can help?” part of the app.

Develop an emergency response app for residents impacted by floods with specific practical information about dealing with flood water, cleaning up after floods, and dealing with private drinking-water wells after flooding. This information is online at but people may have limited computer access and time after a disaster.

Could be combined with CDC ( http://emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/floods/after.asp ) and/or with USGS information about flooding conditions (http://water.usgs.gov/osw/floods/ ) such as WaterWatch.

Develop an app that takes you to local drinking-water quality information based on your location. Basically this would be a mobile, simplified and automated version of the EPA web site that allows you to step through this information to get to your local public water supplier to find their annual water-quality reports.

Create an app that provides visualization and statistics of air quality data in the EPA AQS DataMart database. The purpose would be to provide users with easy access to local air quality data (these data extend beyond basic Air Quality Index data such as displayed on airnow.gov).

By using the phone’s GPS, a user could be offered options of the nearest data monitoring location(s). Users would also have the option to select a location on a map or enter a location (zip, county, etc).

More... The app could then provide access to the data collected by a particular air quality monitoring station, including a graph for each analyze (the user could potentially set the time period), statistics about the concentrations of a particular analyze, perhaps comparison to any applicable federal standards. It would have to provide the information about sampling method and frequency (perhaps with a link to the relevant method guidelines).

For a given analyze, links could be provided to applicable EPA toxics/health info, or a link to an ATSDR ToxFAQs profile: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/index.asp. Basically, connect people to plain language information about what is this, why do we care about it, and what are the possible health effects.

The app would also provide a link and phone number for the appropriate Regional EPA office to contact for more information.

Create a mobile application version of EPA Enviromapper. This app would be very similar to EPA’s enviromapper but would work on a handheld device so that it’d provide real-time data while visiting a site.

More... Also possibilities of reporting any map/data discrepancies should be provided in the App to make it more precise and better.

Develop an application that allows the user to determine what the impact of extensive cooking or baking times have on the consumption of energy. Is the preparation of this particular recipe energy responsible? If a food item takes 90 minutes to 2 hrs. or more to bake in an oven or cook on the stove top, do we really need to make this recipe?

More... We are all familiar reviewing cookbooks, magazine articles or websites which include recipes on how to prepare main dishes or desserts and list calories, total fat, cholesterol, etc. as part of the recipe. What is missing, however, is the ability to determine how much energy is used to prepare these recipes.

This smartphone application that will assist authors of cookbooks, cooking magazines and food website owners to rank a recipe on its conservation of energy. Just like Energy Star system ranks an appliance on its efficiency, a ranking can be created for food preparation time. The background calculations of the program would need to account if someone is using an electric appliance, a gas stove/oven or a crockpot. (Crockpots consistently save more energy).

The ranking of the recipe could be as simple as showing four leaf icons for energy savings to one leaf showing a recipe that consumes a wasteful amount.

Create an app for the professional environmental testing industry. They currently lack a standardized app for logging samples for chemical analysis at the point of collection. Maybe an app that utilizes the GPS and barcode reading capabilities of iphones / android could be used to capture information on site and send directly back to testing labs – i.e. capture time, date, location of sample and link to analytical requirements from sample containers barcode.

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This could all be automatically transferred back to laboratory LIMS systems, streamlining the whole process and improving data integrity – mislabeled / misread samples cost the industry millions. Such an app would be useful for contaminated land investigation / remediation validation, environmental monitoring (waters / soil & air), mining and agricultural testing communities.

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EPA’s environmental data would of course have to be one of the sources of data used. The app would need to have a statistical engine and geospatial display and visualization capabilities. While “correlation does not prove causation”, the app could use multivariate etc. statistical techniques to help users identify possibly important factors. Users should be able to use the app to generate hypotheses for further research. A cool example of one approach that begins to do this is Will Smith’s Dynamic Choropleth Mapper at: http://www.turboperl.com/dcmaps . The visual displays, and user-selectable controls are a nice touch. A weakness is that it doesn’t have the stronger statistical engine to do multivariate analyses across many datasets. Can you top this?

App for clinicians to address pesticide exposure. According to a recent study from Manhattan Research, a health care market research firm, 64 percent of physicians own a smartphone, 30 percent have an iPad and another 28 percent intend to buy one within six months. One-third of health care providers use their smartphones to input patient data to their electronic health record. An increasing amount of physicians and medical students are using medical apps in place of reference and text books to obtain information on protocols for disease pathologies, instruction on medical procedures, and prescription drug dosages and interactions. Apps add functionality for health care providers in at least one of the following three ways: Point of care use, medical education, and/or patient education.

Many physicians receive very little training in environmental health and in particular in diagnosing and managing pesticide poisonings. As a result, pesticide related illnesses are commonly misdiagnosed and under-diagnosed. The book, Recognition and Management of Pesticide Poisonings (EPA#735-R-98-003), http://www.epa.gov/oppfead1/safety/healthcare/handbook/handbook.htm supported by EPA Office of Pesticide Programs, has crucial information for physicians to diagnose and treat pesticide poisonings. However, an increasing number of physicians who are relying on their smart phones and tablets for reference material complain that reference books are cumbersome to transport and inefficient when time is crucial to diagnose and treat poisonings. An app platform would place this information in the hands of health care providers in a timely manner and assist physicians in diagnosing and treating pesticide poisoning.

Recognition and Management of Pesticide Poisonings is available on the EPA website for free download to the public. Any conversion of this book to an app platform should use the best practices and examples of other prominent and widely used diagnostic resources and medical reference books already available on similar platforms. Apps should consider uses of diagnostic trees and be easily updated when additional peer-reviewed versions of Recognition and Management of Pesticide Poisonings become available via the Agency. In order to ensure the integrity of the resource, content would only use the text/material found in the manual, which has been reviewed and written by medical experts. Any supplemental information would only include peer-reviewed information or resources recognized by an appropriate medical or nursing education institution or governing body. Testing of the app by medical experts and review of the coding to correct any inadvertent mistyping of the transferred text would be required for additional verification of the accuracy of the app's reflection of manual content.

Please contact Kristen Keteles, Carolyn Schroeder or Emily Selia in EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs for questions regarding the manual.

Develop an app that allows you to take a picture* of the food you are eating/purchasing and then gives you the location it likely came from, including the average amount of energy spent processing it or transporting (data pulled possibly from DOE and USDA) and your carbon equivalent footprint. I believe the paper trail is available for international commerce and interstate commerce (through DOC?). It could link to your GPS in your phone to draw inference to where your retailer purchases its supplies whether you are in a Kroger or a McDonalds or a Department Store.

* You would have to hack existing facial recognition software {or existing leaf recognition software} to identify the most common foods or read the UPC of products. This will allow green conscious consumers to make decisions on the fly about the food and other goods they consume. Plus, it would be cool.