AURA gives real-time comfort information about public places — parks, squares, markets and civic buildings. Small sensor kits installed on site measure noise, air quality and temperature, and AURA turns those numbers into a plain answer: is it comfortable there right now?

It is built for autistic and sensory-sensitive people and for those who support them, but anyone can use it.

From Smart Citizen sensor kits installed in each place by the city or the venue. Every kit reports its readings every few minutes; AURA stores them and shows the latest value, a 24-hour trend and a longer history for each place.

Each reading is compared with a comfort profile — a set of limits for that kind of place. Good means the value is inside the comfortable range, moderate that it is getting close to the limit, and bad that it is over it. The limits are set with sensory-sensitive people in mind, so they are stricter than a typical health guideline.

A single number from 0 to 100 that sums up how the place feels right now, weighing noise, air quality and temperature together. Above 65 counts as comfortable; below 50 as rough. When a place has no kit reporting, there is no score — AURA never guesses.

Either no sensor kit is installed there yet, or the kit has gone quiet — a flat battery, no network, or maintenance. The values come back automatically as soon as the kit reports again; the place page also shows when the last reading arrived.

The website shows every monitored place and its live readings to anyone. The app adds the personal side: alerts for the places you care about, your own comfort profile, saved places, and a log of the places you visited with how each one felt while you were there.

On the App Store (iPhone) and Google Play (Android). Until it is published, the badges on this site say “Coming soon” — they turn into download links the day it ships.

Not to look. Every place and its readings are public. You need an account only for the personal features in the app — alerts, your comfort profile, saved places and visits — because those have to be stored somewhere that is yours.

In the app you pick a place and a feeling — “tell me when it gets loud at the market”, “let me know when the square is calm”. There are no thresholds or numbers to learn: AURA translates the feeling into limits for you. When the place crosses them, you get a notification on your phone; when it settles, another one tells you it is fine again.

Yes. Every alert has an on/off switch in the app. Switch it off for a fortnight and back on later — the rule is kept exactly as you set it.

Operators can publish alerts for everyone — “heat warning at the market”, “festival noise on the square this weekend”. In the app you subscribe to the ones you want; they show up in the same list as your own, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Your own limits. In the app you say what bothers you — noise, stuffy air, heat — and how much. From then on readings and alerts are judged against your limits rather than a place’s general ones, so “too loud for you” can be true even when the place shows moderate for everyone else.

Yes. A supervisor — a parent, carer or support worker — can be linked to your account by an operator. They can then choose a comfort preset for you and create or remove alerts on your behalf, and they are notified when one of your alerts fires.

Only if you turn visits on in the app, and even then the decision happens on your phone: it notices when you enter or leave a monitored place and tells AURA “a visit started” or “ended”. No coordinates are ever sent or stored — only which place and when. You can switch it off and erase the whole log at any time.

Your mood and tags are combined with everyone else’s into an anonymous “what visitors say” summary on the place page. A written note is shown publicly only after an operator approves it, and never with your name.

Get in touch through the contact form. Joining means installing one or more Smart Citizen kits in each place you want monitored and registering them in AURA; from then on the place appears on the site and in the app, and your operators manage its comfort profile and alerts from the console.