Spotlight On Success: Breathe Jersey

"Jersey has been recognised for its ideal size to act at a test bed for a long time. We have a wonderfully diverse population of an ideal size to make any statistical data relevant. We have world-leading data networks and an abundance of talent across many disciplines."

Andrew Le Seelleur
Thrive Jersey

Tell us a little bit about your idea and your journey to coming up with it.

Thrive Jersey is all about innovation and exploring the causes of low mood and disengagement within our amazing community. By understanding where the gaps exist, we are able to leverage our extensive on and off-island network to bring the right people, projects and technology together to start influencing real and long-lasting positive change.

Having developed two projects looking at addressing issues such as suicide, nutritional deficit, sustainable agriculture, loneliness and isolation, we turned our attention to pollution. Historically, air pollution monitoring has been undertaken by government but has been subject to limited resources. We believe that the best way to influence the community to make positive decisions about their vehicle use is to monitor pollution on an island-wide and real-time basis.

Our solution is based upon other similar projects in the UK and beyond. We researched the market for low-cost, high accuracy monitoring equipment and have partnered with Clarity, who are running similar initiatives in over 85 cities around the world.

Data will be collected, validated and offered as open source for research and other purposes. We will involve all areas of the community, including schools, parishes and other interested parties to provide a real-time picture of how polluted our environment really is.

How will Impact Jersey help your project grow further? Where will you take your project after Impact Jersey?

We are thrilled to be one of the successful Impact Jersey applicants. The positive feedback received from the judging panel has justified our efforts and the vision. Without this funding, we would not be in a place to launch the project as quickly as we now plan.

Our main milestone is to establish the entire monitoring network, which will cover all twelve parishes and the ports. Once installed and following a period of calibration, we will be in a position to start disseminating real-time data.

Our medium-term aim is to add water pollution data to the network and enhance data distribution by overlaying related health metrics and developing an interactive website.

What makes Jersey a great place for innovative projects?

Jersey has been recognised for its ideal size to act at a test bed for a long time. We have a wonderfully diverse population of an ideal size to make any statistical data relevant. We have world-leading data networks and an abundance of talent across many disciplines.

We at Thrive feel that there is a substantial proportion of the community just waiting to be inspired to get involved in influencing and making positive change, and Breathe Jersey is a perfect example of this opportunity.

What does innovation mean to you?

At Thrive, we believe that innovation is driven by creating inspiring visions, inspiring the community to work together, and creating or finding solutions that make things better for as many people as possible.