5 May 2014

foligram.com, an app created by two Sherbrookers and a Montrealer, ranked in the top 20 of the People’s Choice Award for the International Space Apps Challenge, a competition organized by NASA.

The team, consisting of developer Nicolas Lupien, computer science student Alex Provencher, and imaging programmer Lucie Bélanger, designed a tool to determine air quality… by photographing tree leaves!

The principle is simple: using a smartphone, you take a picture of a tree leaf, and then tweet it to @foligram. The app uses the picture’s colours and irregularities to calculate the surface of the leaf affected by ozone air pollution and then redirects you to a link containing the leaf’s data.

As a result, the foligram.com team collects data from all over the world to refine its air quality analyses.

foligram.com is the winner of the Montreal final, which was held at the Planetarium in mid-April.