Atmosome: The Personal Atmospheric Exposome

Modern health research is increasingly separated into various “omics” fields. Omics provides a quantified approach to the total collective information about the various realms of biology. One aspect of omics called the exposome relates to the collective exposures an individual is placed in throughout their life. A subset of this exposome, is the atmospheric exposome, which we name as the “atmosome”. Air surrounds individuals from the moment they are born till they take their last breath. The atmosphere is constantly changing, given our location and surroundings are always dynamic throughout life. The atmosphere inevitably plays a massive role in our health such as impact on DNA damage, metabolism, skin integrity, and lung health. In this work, we discuss the significance of the atmosome in personalized health and present our atmosome sensing system. We developed and analyzed data from our IoT, microcontroller-based system which collects real-time individual air quality data and posts it to a cloud server for immediate access. Our experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the data we collected and the avenues our system creates for direct lifestyle to environment correlations. Quantifying the individual atmosome is a next step in advancing personalized health and medical research. Our two main goals in this paper are to present the atmosome as a concept and to explain how to track it using low-cost electronics.