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The ASTHMA european project aims at building an integrated, multi-disciplinary system in order to provide near real time accurate information on aeroallergens and air quality to the sensitive users on an individual basis and at specific locations to help them in optimising their medication and improve their quality of life.
In order to provide an accurate near-real time information to the end-users, the forecast computation must rely on near real-time pollen concentration measurements. At current date, several days may separate the measurements and the pollen count task. The accuracy requested by the forecast system may lead to an increase of the measurements sites and a decrease of this time. This implies the processing of more measurements and therefore the training of more technicians for the pollen analysis. To reduce the inherent cost of such improvement, it is necessary to investigate towards an automated processing of the measurements as well as to help in the training of the technicians.
A semi-automatic system for pollen recognition is studied for this task. The goal of such a system is to provide accurate pollen concentration measurements. This information can be used as well by the palynologists, the clinicians or a forecast system to predict pollen dispersion.
The partners and their key persons involved in this task are:
(*) Members of the REA, the Spanish Aeroallergen Network