SaansCompass
Every winter morning in Delhi starts with an AQI number that tells you nothing about what to do. We built Saans Compass on AWS to turn the air where you are into a simple, personal plan for your day.
Every winter in Delhi, the morning starts with a number.
We check it the way we check the weather, sigh a little, and then do exactly what we were going to do anyway. The number is real, but it doesn't answer the questions we actually have. Should my son play cricket after school today? When should a delivery rider take his break? Is it safe to open the windows and for how long? Does today's GRAP order mean I can't take my car out?
Saans means breath in Hindi. We built**** SaansCompass for the WeMakeDevs x AWS Environmental Hacks (Air track) because we wanted to stop asking "how bad is the air?" and start asking "what should I do about it, today?"
A plan, not a number
You start by telling Saans Compass about your day in your own words: "I deliver food on a scooter in Noida, 11am to 10pm", or "Class 4 student, I walk to school". It works out what kind of day that is, reads the air near where you start and where you're going, hour by hour, and gives you back a plan.
The plan tells you the cleanest hours to be outside and what to move to a better time. It shows which GRAP rules actually touch your day and what to keep indoors. It also adds how your age and health change any of that. Someone with asthma gets a different plan from a healthy twenty-year-old, because their limits are different.
The parts we're proudest of
Your trips, and a cleaner way there: For people who travel, the plan shows the air at the start, along the way and at the destination, out and back, read from the nearest live monitoring station. Amazon Location Service finds alternative routes, and when your usual way is bad enough, the plan tells you which route means breathing less of it.
GRAP rules that are about you: Delhi-NCR's Graded Response Action Plan is long and full of clauses. We wrote its rules as Cedar policies, so every decision ("Not allowed", "Advised against", "Check the official order") comes from a rule and names its clause. You only see a card when a rule changes your day, and everything else fits on one line. Anything no verified rule covers says "Check the official order", never a guess.
Days without a trip: Not everyone commutes. A student at school all day or a parent at home needs a different kind of plan. On those days Saans Compass draws a 24-hour window planner: when to air the rooms, when to keep them shut, and when a purifier earns its electricity.
Dose saved: We wanted people to feel the difference, so the plan estimates how much less PM2.5 you breathe by following it, compared with the same time outside at the worst hours. Signed-in users can keep a small weekly diary of how much they saved.
Ask Saans: A chat that knows your plan. Ask "I'm taking my students to Noida by bus, when should we leave?" and it looks up the air there and answers with times and AQI, in English or Hindi, and it can read the answer aloud.
Try a different day: Your saved profile stays as it is, but you can see the plan for a different trip or different hours with one small form.
Built on AWS
The whole app runs serverless in Mumbai (ap-south-1), defined in one AWS SAM template:
- AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway serve every page and the API.
- Amazon DynamoDB holds the air caches, saved profiles, the diary and rate limits, with TTL so old data cleans itself up.
- Amazon Cognito handles sign-up and sign-in.
- Amazon EventBridge Scheduler and Amazon SNS send morning and evening email alerts, filtered by area.
- Amazon Location Service draws the pollution map and calculates the alternative routes.
- Amazon Polly speaks the advice in Indian English and Hindi, and Amazon Translate turns the whole page into Hindi.
- AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store keeps the API keys and the officially declared GRAP stage.
- Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray watch over it all, with an AWS Budgets alert so a student project never surprises anyone with a bill.
What we learned along the way
Real data is messy. The government's live station feed wasn't always reachable, so the app falls back to another station network and then to a forecast model, and it always tells you which one you're looking at.
AI is a good explainer and a bad judge. Personal advice and the chat run on an AI model, but the AI never decides a rule. The GRAP decisions come from Cedar, and the numbers come from the data. We even caught the model calling an AQI of 218 "moderate" (it's Poor), so now every number reaches the AI with its band attached, and we check its answers before they reach you.
Privacy matters most when the data is about your body. Health details are never logged, your live location is never stored, and deleting your account deletes everything with it.
Why it matters
Air pollution feels too big for any one person to do anything about. We can't clean Delhi's air with an app. But we can help one person breathe a little less of it today: by leaving twenty minutes later, taking the second route, closing the window at 7 pm instead of 9, or moving PT to the afternoon. Those small choices add up, every day, for millions of people.
That's what Saans Compass is for. Not another number, but a gentle nudge in the right direction, one breath at a time.
Team Qubits, WeMakeDevs x AWS Environmental Hacks, Bharat Builds Tour 2026.
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