Exposomes: Where Smart Cities, AI, and the Scientific Community Meet

From the moment we're conceived, we are exposed to exposomes. Exposomes are the environmental exposures we encounter throughout our lives and how they impact our health. There are external and internal exposomes, as well as good ones and bad ones. Good ones can be a healthy diet or exposure to nature. And then there are the bad ones like air pollutants, radiation, internal inflammation, or a stressful job or a toxic ex. Exposomes will have a huge impact on a person's health and even lifespan. Good exposomes may make you live longer, bad ones, the contrary, considering 70 to 90% of chronic illnesses are linked to people's environments, meaning non-genetic influences. The study of exposomes complement the genomic study, for example, chronic disease. It can be cancers, a respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and even mental disease. There's a lot of different chronic diseases, and in each one, exposomes can impact them and the development of them. The importance of exposomes is leading to more research and conversations with conferences and workshops, like the Moonshot Forum in Washington, D.C., gathering experts, scientists, and innovators in the field to discuss how exposomes influence health, but also, what can be done to curb people's exposure to bad exposomes and what the future looks like. Because it's all very scientific, we could imagine just scientists leading the discussion. However, the smart city industry plays a key role in this conversation when it comes to keeping the list of external bad exposomes, or pollutomes, short, governments and municipalities can play an incredibly crucial role, a role that can be boosted through smart city tech and now, especially through AI. Poor air quality, extreme heat, noise pollution, UV exposure, contaminated water... These are all pollutomes that can be reduced with government policies or better urban planning. Data is not the problem. Sensors have been deployed for decades. Satellites and public datasets are available. What's changed now is our ability to process, interpret and act on that data thanks to AI. A company putting AI to work in this field is Meersens, with an AI tool that allows them to simplify how exposome data is understood, visualized and acted upon. The environmental data platform collects, aggregates, analyzes, and visualizes environmental data- from air quality to UV to noise pollution- to give a clear, high level picture of environmental conditions across specific areas. Data is ingested and the tool’s AI model standardizes and integrates these sources, predicting missing data using historical trends, environmental correlations, and geospatial interpolation. Finally, it identifies potential health risks based on current and forecasted exposures. All this information can be used by cities to decide the steps that need to be taken to keep pollutants in check. The city can inform people about it. So the population can take some decisions about where they go the weekend. But you can also try to reduce your air pollution by reducing traffic. Or give some gifts for people who use more the bike and communal transportation, for example. And it's not just cities. The private sector, including health agencies and cosmetic or insurance companies are also turning to this type of AI solution to inform clients, to design improved products and assess risk in more nuanced ways. It doesn't matter how much scientists discuss the consequences of bad exposomes if city players aren't included, because what's important is solving the issue, and cities holds the piece that completes the puzzle. Curbing bad exposomes is a topic in which the scientific community and the smart city world meet, and AI becomes the bridge. AI innovators will play an important role to help with decisions, as AI can help decision makers take smarter, faster and more targeted actions, helping cities fulfill their sustainability and life quality goals.