The Crowd & The Cloud, a new science series premiering in April on KET, includes a segment on a Louisville project to use asthma inhalers equipped with sensors to track and better understand the city’s widespread prevalence of asthma.

The episode, which airs Monday, April 17 at 4/3 pm on KET2 and Friday, April 21 at 4/3 am on KET, details how asthma inhaler sensors produced by Propeller Health can help generate real-time maps of environmental dangers – in an attempt to help patients better understand the causes of their symptoms.

The project, dubbed AIR Louisville, is supported by the city of Louisville; a coalition of Louisville-area employers, health care providers and health advocacy groups; the Institute for Health Air, Water and Soil; and Propeller Health, a national provider of FDA-approved digital health platforms to track asthma and COPD.

The series, hosted by former NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, takes viewers on a global tour of crowd-sourced projects that blend citizen science and technological advancements. It details how smartphones and mobile technology are allowing everyday citizens to become active participants in a new, twenty-first century approach to scientific discovery.

The Crowd & The Cloud reports that Propeller’s sensors, which attach directly to a patient’s asthma inhaler, automatically log information about when their medication is used, creating a continuous record for the patient and their physician – and for researchers, who can use the data to look for breakout trends. The episode details the significance of the project’s location in Louisville, which has one of the highest rates of adult asthma in the United States.

Other episodes in the series, which premieres Monday, April 3 at 4/3 pm on KET2 and Friday, April 7 at 4/3 am on KET, look at tracking climate change via bird migration and monitoring water quality through new mobile apps, among other innovations.

The Crowd & The Cloud is produced and written by Geoff Haines-Stiles with funding from the National Science Foundation. Additional information about the series can be found online at crowdandcloud.org.

KET is Kentucky’s largest classroom, serving more than one million people each week via television, online and mobile. Learn more about Kentucky’s preeminent public media organization on Twitter @KET and facebook.com/KET and at KET.org.

Contact:

Todd Piccirilli
Senior Director, Marketing and Communications
859-258-7242
tpiccirilli@ket.org