Developing an API to Supply Third-party Applications with Environmental Data

In healthcare, weather-sensitivity and the effect of environmental factors on various diseases were subject to extensive research in the last decades. Mostly without discovering statistically significant relationships between diseases and environmental parameters. This is often attributed to a lack of scale for existing studies.

Currently, there are no openly available solutions that can support surveys in this regard.Such solutions should be easy to integrate with an existing study platform. In turn, environmental data needs to be fetched for multiple users. This fact led to studies restricting participants in terms of their location or other factors. Consequently, this also meant, that the size of the studies was limited due to the placed constraints. Through the advance of technology, it is now possible to easily retrieve additional information from participants via their mobile smart devices which can be used to fetch various other types of data.

These circumstances led to the creation of an environmental data API described in this thesis. It provides functionality to retrieve environmental data from various data sources for a given tuple of latitude, longitude, and timestamp. The API facilitates adding new data sources by simply extending the provided examples. There are no restrictions in terms of spatial or temporal resolution or even source of the data. The resulting API fetches environmental data from multiple sources. It also facilitates obtaining data from other data sources and querying by researchers - including options to filter the data by various parameters. Finally, the API also supports converting between different units.