Attribution

Be I/O shows readings it did not take. They come from four organizations, and each one asks to be credited when its figures are used. This page is that credit; the app also names the contributor and license of whichever monitor is on screen, on the monitor’s own page.

Be I/O adapts these readings. It combines a concentration with an estimate of how much air you breathe to work out what you take in, so the figures in the app are the app’s rather than the monitor’s. Nothing here is endorsed by any of them.

AirGradient

Public monitors near you, and your own AirGradient monitor when you’re away from home, come through AirGradient’s map. Monitors on that map are published under the license each one names — usually CC BY-SA 4.0 — and AirGradient explains the arrangement in Data Ownership and Sharing.

OpenAQ

Reference monitors — the regulatory-grade instruments, the ones others are calibrated against — reach that map through OpenAQ, from networks like AirNow. Their terms are in OpenAQ’s documentation, and the license varies with the network behind the monitor: AirNow’s readings are in the US public domain, which asks for nothing.

Sensor.Community

Some of the low-cost sensors on the map are contributed through Sensor.Community, generally under the Database Contents License.

PurpleAir

A PurpleAir sensor of your own is read directly over your own network, and nothing leaves the house. Away from home it’s read through PurpleAir’s API instead, under their terms. PurpleAir owns the readings its sensors produce, whoever bought the hardware.

The guideline

The 15 µg/m³ daily figure is the World Health Organization’s 2021 air quality guideline. What Be I/O does with it — turning it into a daily budget and spending that budget on your own breathing — is the app’s arithmetic and not WHO’s advice. How it works explains the step.