Flumena is a citizen science monitoring system for rivers and a platform for organizing environmental events. The project is the result of an exploration in river pollution and sustainability. The design has two parts. A web app and Flumen kits. Web apps allow users to view the heartbeat of rivers at different locations where the Flumen kits are installed. The heartbeat is essentially a 3d data visualization generated from data collected in real-time from the flumen kits. The Flumen kits are powered by an Arduino board with sensors and a GPRS/GPS chip attached to it. The web app is also a platform for organizing restorative activity events. Users can either choose to set up an activity that revolves around restoration of rivers or join one. The research interest of the project was looking at how data visualization could be used as a motivator for restorative activity.
