Co-Designing a Community-Driven Environmental Sensor System for Heat Justice
Oluwafemi Oladosu, Jesse Awuah and (PI) Amy Yeboah Quarkume, PhD
INTRODUCTION
RESULTS
CONCLUSION
The heat is frustrating because it's not like, the flooding issue, people worry about it when they can see it. Without heat waves, without the shocks, you're left this invisible stressor. I can't really quantify it because we haven't done tests on it. And yet we know there are dangerous levels of it out there that people have inside and outside their homes.– Local Professor in Miami
When a Little Haiti resident says the heat "just bakes all day," he is describing a measurable, addressable environmental justice condition that requires community-controlled data to document and community-trusted infrastructure to sustain. HUTlogger demonstrates that the design assumptions typically excluding frontline communities from robust monitoring, including WiFi dependency, researcher-controlled pipelines, proprietary data custody, and enclosures signaling external ownership, are choices and not necessities. The co-design process is complete. The hardware has been built. The pipeline has been validated. Five students who conducted the community interviews in Fall 2025, visited in Winter 2025, and co-designed the device they will deploy are ready to return to Little Haiti this summer as environmental scientists. The sensor is a device. What it represents is something larger: a community's insistence on measuring the world it lives in, on its own terms.
In sustainability sciences, where big data and machine learning are quickly becoming standard tools, little is known about how bias and inequality will propagate through to the output. We are pulling in data from satellites, buoys, drifters, weather stations, a wide range of autonomous sensors, fishing logs, and even social media sites, to plug into our algorithms.
- Nick Record and Lourdes Vera
REFERENCES
Every year it gets hotter and hotter. Last year we reached 103°F, and this year is already on track to exceed that.”
– Little Haiti Community Activist
Urban heat islands—where neighborhoods can be up to 7°F hotter than surrounding areas—are intensifying across cities and pose serious risks to public health. Yet the systems used to monitor and respond to these conditions are not neutral. Communities experiencing the greatest heat burden—particularly fence-line neighborhoods like Little Haiti in Miami—are often missing from the very data infrastructures used to guide policy, investment, and intervention. In Little Haiti, extreme heat is not abstract—it is lived daily. Metal roofs, limited tree canopy, expansive asphalt, and proximity to industrial corridors create an environment that residents experience as persistently oppressive, especially from late spring through early fall. While residents clearly understand these conditions, the ability to document them with credible, georeferenced, and time-stamped data remains limited. This gap between lived experience and usable evidence continues to constrain community advocacy and policy response.
To address this gap, this project introduces the HUTlogger, an open-hardware environmental data logger co-designed with Little Haiti residents and community partners through a two-year participatory process. The HUTlogger enables communities to generate their own hyperlocal temperature data, strengthening their ability to document conditions, inform local decision-making, and advocate for more equitable climate solutions.
RESEARCH QUESTION
This study explores how youth-led, community-centered environmental sensing can support equitable climate action. The following questions arise:
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
We began by engaging directly with the community to understand their data needs, working closely with three students from PowerU in Miami, Florida as youth leaders in the process. Through conversations and listening sessions, residents shared their experiences with extreme heat and identified the need for accessible, hyperlocal data they could use for advocacy and decision-making. These insights shaped the design of HUTlogger, ensuring the technology reflected community priorities from the very beginning.
3D PRINTED
The HUTlogger case is 3D printed and co-designed with community members, incorporating feedback from students and residents throughout the design process. This ensures the device is not only functional, but also reflects local identity, usability needs, and community ownership.
DATA DASHBOARD
sd
V1 -COMPONENTS
V2 -COMPONENTS
PowerU students
Table 1: Structural limitations common to available citizen science monitoring tools and corresponding HUTlogger design responses. | |
Structural Limitation in Available Tools | HUTlogger Design Response |
Single-variable sensing (temperature only, or temperature and humidity) forecloses analysis of co-occurring environmental burdens | Simultaneous logging of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and gas resistance captures the full heat stress and air quality environment in one device |
No onboard GPS means every record's spatial validity depends on manual logging accuracy; device displacement produces attribution errors | Onboard GPS: lat, lon, altitude, UTC timestamp per record; spatial analysis without researcher retrieval |
Data retrieval requires physical researcher presence or persistent WiFi infrastructure, creating barriers in communities where neither can be guaranteed | Offline-first architecture stores up to 69 days onboard; auto-syncs via any available WiFi including a student's mobile hotspot; BLE enables instant field access with no infrastructure |
Data pipelines route community-generated environmental data to researcher institutions or proprietary corporate platforms, removing community custody of their own evidence | Data syncs directly to a Google Sheet co-administered by the community partner and research team from the moment of first record; no intermediary controls access |
Community members are positioned as deployment hosts or passive participants with no interactive access to data during the monitoring period | Any community member with a smartphone and the HU Field Logger PWA can connect via BLE in seconds, view live readings, and download the full dataset on demand |
Per-unit cost or retrieval overhead constrains how densely networks can be deployed, limiting spatial resolution in the neighborhoods that need it most | Commodity open-source components and 3D-printed enclosures keep unit cost accessible; community-operated sync eliminates researcher retrieval labor costs |
Table 1. Structural limitations common to available citizen science monitoring tools and corresponding HUTlogger design responses.
Table 2: HUTlogger complete data pipeline. Both the WiFi sync path (left) and the BLE on-demand path (right) converge at a shared HTTP POST endpoint, routing all records to a community-owned Google Sheet in real time. | |||
Goal | Feature | Component | Community Benefit |
Multi-parameter | Temp, humidity, pressure, gas resistance | BME688 | Full heat stress profile in one device |
Offline-first | 69-day onboard storage; WiFi + BLE sync | SPIFFS + ESP32-S3 | Works without stable infrastructure |
GPS per record | GPS coordinates + UTC timestamp per record | PA1010D | Spatial analysis without researcher retrieval |
Community data | Real-time dashboard; one-click CSV; co-administered data | BLE + Google Sheets | Community owns and accesses data instantly |
Community form | 3D printed enclosure with Haitian flag motifs | Open hardware | Community-owned form; builds trust and recognition |
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ESP32-S3 |
BME688 sensor |
PA1010D GPS |
SPIFFS flash storage |
WiFi to Google Sheets |
BLE to HU Field Logger |
Battery monitoring |
ESP32-S3 |
BME688 sensor |
BLE to HU Field Logger |
Battery monitoring |
BLE DATA PIPELINE AND WEB APP
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