Development and Analysis of Low-Cost IoT Sensors for Urban Environmental Monitoring

The accelerated pace of urbanization is having a major impact over the world’s environment. Although urban dwellers have higher living standards and can access better public services as compared to their rural counterparts, they are usually exposed to poor environmental conditions such as air pollution and noise. In order for municipalities and citizens to mitigate the negative effects of pollution, the monitoring of certain parameters, such as air quality and ambient sound levels, both in indoor and outdoor locations, has to be performed. The current paper presents a complete solution that allows the monitoring of ambient parameters such as Volatile Organic Compounds, temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and sound intensity levels both in indoor and outdoor spaces. The presented solution comprises of low-cost, easy to deploy, wireless sensors and a cloud application for their management and for storing and visualizing the recorded data

Transit Pollution Exposure Monitoring using Low-Cost Wearable Sensors

Transit activities are a significant contributor to a person's daily exposure to pollutants. Currently obtaining accurate information about the personal exposure of a commuter is challenging as existing solutions either have a coarse monitoring resolution that omits subtle variations in pollutant concentrations or are laborious and costly to use. We contribute by systematically analysing the feasibility of using wearable low-cost pollution sensors for capturing the total exposure of commuters. Through extensive experiments carried out in the Helsinki metropolitan region, we demonstrate that low-cost sensors can capture the overall exposure with sufficient accuracy, while at the same time providing insights into variations within transport modalities. We also demonstrate that wearable sensors can capture subtle variations caused by differing routes, passenger density, location within a carriage, and other factors. For example, we demonstrate that location within the vehicle carriage can result in up to 25% increase in daily pollution exposure -- a significant difference that existing solutions are unable to capture. Finally, we highlight the practical benefits of low-cost sensors as a pollution monitoring solution by introducing applications that are enabled by low-cost wearable sensors.Peer reviewe