Pran Vayu

Inspiration

Chennai has terrible air quality, but most people step outside without any awareness of it. Existing AQI apps show a number — but numbers don't tell a mother in Manali Industrial Area that today's air is harming her lungs. We wanted to turn raw environmental data into personal, actionable health guidance in the language people actually speak.

What it does

PranVayu is an AI-powered air quality and health advisor for Chennai residents. It fetches real-time AQI from 50+ city locations, adjusts scores by zone type (industrial, traffic, residential), and delivers personalised health advice grounded in WHO and TNPCB guidelines — in Tamil and English. Zero health data is stored server-side.

How we built it

FastAPI backend, vanilla JS frontend, Groq LLaMA 3.3 70B for inference, LangChain + FAISS for the RAG pipeline (indexed on WHO and TNPCB guidelines), OpenAQ for live AQI data, and OpenWeather for UV and humidity.

Challenges we ran into

Tuning the RAG pipeline to return zone-specific, user-relevant chunks took significant iteration. Tamil language support required careful prompt engineering to prevent the model from switching back to English mid-response. Handling missing or inconsistent OpenAQ data for certain Chennai zones was also tricky.

Accomplishments we're proud of

PranVayu explains what air quality means for you specifically — in your language, based on your zone. Getting Tamil to work naturally and building a fully grounded RAG pipeline as a student project felt like real wins.

What we learned

The hardest part wasn't the AI — it was the responsibility. Every decision around health advice phrasing, data privacy, and when to say "consult a doctor" had real implications. We also learned that multilingual support shapes architecture from day one, not something you add at the end.

What's next for PranVayu

Expanding to other Indian cities, adding push alerts for high-AQI days, integrating water quality and heatwave data, and building a mobile PWA — with the long-term goal of making hyperlocal environmental health intelligence accessible to every Indian resident regardless of language or location.