A CleanAir Greece

CleanAir Greece is a project focusing on a major problem related to health that many countries are nowadays facing: non-compliance with smoke-free laws in public places (venues, indoors offices, health care facilities etc). The core of the project is then to find feasible and digital alternatives that could limit the impact of illegal indoor smoking upon public health. This major issue is of course related to several factors or causes such as the lack of resources (necessary to run inspections), the lack of data (necessary to know what is really going on in terms of tobacco compliance) and the general lack of commitment from local authorities. CleanAir Greece now believes that, by influencing one of those factors, it is possible to have an impact on the main issue and to increase the global level of compliance.
The project therefore aims to focus on the lack of data in order to start overcoming the more general problem of non-compliance. Being able to collect accurate data through crowdsourcing in order to map the non-complying places would enable public authorities as well as individuals to directly follow the evolution of the indoor-smoking situation and to start planning strategies to avoid and/or reduce it. But without accurate data, it is difficult to clearly identify non-complying locations and to determine to which extent public specific public places comply with smoke-free laws currently in force (some of them might fully comply, others not, and others partially). CleanAir Greece is thus willing, by taking advantage of crowdsourcing methods and ICTs, to map such non-complying locations in order to help tackle the broader problem of non-compliance with smoke-free laws.
The tool for mapping is now in a form of a free mobile phone and web application, namely Epicollect5. This application is available at any moment to anyone.