scholarly journals Establishing A Sustainable Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring Setup: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

Sensors ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 394
Author(s):  
Mannam Veera Narayana ◽  
Devendra Jalihal ◽  
S.M. Shiva Nagendra

Low-cost sensors (LCS) are becoming popular for air quality monitoring (AQM). They promise high spatial and temporal resolutions at low-cost. In addition, citizen science applications such as personal exposure monitoring can be implemented effortlessly. However, the reliability of the data is questionable due to various error sources involved in the LCS measurement. Furthermore, sensor performance drift over time is another issue. Hence, the adoption of LCS by regulatory agencies is still evolving. Several studies have been conducted to improve the performance of low-cost sensors. This article summarizes the existing studies on the state-of-the-art of LCS for AQM. We conceptualize a step by step procedure to establish a sustainable AQM setup with LCS that can produce reliable data. The selection of sensors, calibration and evaluation, hardware setup, evaluation metrics and inferences, and end user-specific applications are various stages in the LCS-based AQM setup we propose. We present a critical analysis at every step of the AQM setup to obtain reliable data from the low-cost measurement. Finally, we conclude this study with future scope to improve the availability of air quality data.

Author(s):  
K. Lehmann ◽  
A. Minhans ◽  
M. K. Fajari ◽  
M. Hahn

Abstract. The effect of particulate matter is increasingly gaining significance due to its harmful effects on human and urban ecosystems. In view of it, many communities worldwide are collecting air quality data privately to influence their policy makers to make stricter provisions for reducing harmful emissions and thereby improving their quality of life. Likewise, in many German cities, a community of air quality monitors which rely on low-cost PM Sensors is gathering momentum. Such communities possess privately-owned & low-cost air quality monitoring devices that claim to accurately measure PM concentrations and are openly accessible via internet. One such initiative is an air quality monitoring network viz. “luftdaten.info”, which contains of more than 300 low-cost sensors that consistently obtains PM data, colloquially referred as fine dust, in the city of Stuttgart as well as its surrounding districts. Besides, eight stations are continuously monitoring PM concentration in Stuttgart; these are operated by the State Environmental Agency (LuBW- Landesanstalt für Umwelt Baden-Württemberg). Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences (HFT) has currently installed 7 low-cost PM sensors to monitor and study PM concentration in one of its projects. This study endeavors to relate PM 2.5 and PM 10.0 using low-cost sensors. It intends to investigate the reliability of the measured PM concentration using such low-costs sensors once these are placed horizontally and vertically apart and comparing the measures of the 7 sensors. Another objective is to compare the PM concentration measurements with a meteorological station operated by the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg in the vicinity. A correlation analysis is performed to develop understanding of relationships of PM concentration with meteorological parameters, viz. with respect to ambient temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Furthermore, it attempts to develop a regression model using above listed meteorological parameters. Finally, deficiencies in the measurement of low-costs and its placement effects are commented. Further suggestions are made for improving the data capturing and analytical procedures while using low-cost sensors.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (9) ◽  
pp. 3021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeba Idrees ◽  
Zhuo Zou ◽  
Lirong Zheng

With the swift growth in commerce and transportation in the modern civilization, much attention has been paid to air quality monitoring, however existing monitoring systems are unable to provide sufficient spatial and temporal resolutions of the data with cost efficient and real time solutions. In this paper we have investigated the issues, infrastructure, computational complexity, and procedures of designing and implementing real-time air quality monitoring systems. To daze the defects of the existing monitoring systems and to decrease the overall cost, this paper devised a novel approach to implement the air quality monitoring system, employing the edge-computing based Internet-of-Things (IoT). In the proposed method, sensors gather the air quality data in real time and transmit it to the edge computing device that performs necessary processing and analysis. The complete infrastructure & prototype for evaluation is developed over the Arduino board and IBM Watson IoT platform. Our model is structured in such a way that it reduces the computational burden over sensing nodes (reduced to 70%) that is battery powered and balanced it with edge computing device that has its local data base and can be powered up directly as it is deployed indoor. Algorithms were employed to avoid temporary errors in low cost sensor, and to manage cross sensitivity problems. Automatic calibration is set up to ensure the accuracy of the sensors reporting, hence achieving data accuracy around 75–80% under different circumstances. In addition, a data transmission strategy is applied to minimize the redundant network traffic and power consumption. Our model acquires a power consumption reduction up to 23% with a significant low cost. Experimental evaluations were performed under different scenarios to validate the system’s effectiveness.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (23) ◽  
pp. 7977
Author(s):  
Marian-Emanuel Ionascu ◽  
Nuria Castell ◽  
Oana Boncalo ◽  
Philipp Schneider ◽  
Marius Darie ◽  
...  

During the last decade, extensive research has been carried out on the subject of low-cost sensor platforms for air quality monitoring. A key aspect when deploying such systems is the quality of the measured data. Calibration is especially important to improve the data quality of low-cost air monitoring devices. The measured data quality must comply with regulations issued by national or international authorities in order to be used for regulatory purposes. This work discusses the challenges and methods suitable for calibrating a low-cost sensor platform developed by our group, Airify, that has a unit cost five times less expensive than the state-of-the-art solutions (approximately €1000). The evaluated platform can integrate a wide variety of sensors capable of measuring up to 12 parameters, including the regulatory pollutants defined in the European Directive. In this work, we developed new calibration models (multivariate linear regression and random forest) and evaluated their effectiveness in meeting the data quality objective (DQO) for the following parameters: carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O3), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). The experimental results show that the proposed calibration managed an improvement of 12% for the CO and O3 gases and a similar accuracy for the NO2 gas compared to similar state-of-the-art studies. The evaluated parameters had different calibration accuracies due to the non-identical levels of gas concentration at which the sensors were exposed during the model’s training phase. After the calibration algorithms were applied to the evaluated platform, its performance met the DQO criteria despite the overall low price level of the platform.


Author(s):  
A. Hernández-Gordillo ◽  
S. Ruiz-Correa ◽  
V. Robledo-Valero ◽  
C. Hernández-Rosales ◽  
S. Arriaga

Author(s):  
Chekwube A. Okigbo ◽  
Amar Seeam ◽  
Shivanand P. Guness ◽  
Xavier Bellekens ◽  
Girish Bekaroo ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3338
Author(s):  
Ivan Vajs ◽  
Dejan Drajic ◽  
Nenad Gligoric ◽  
Ilija Radovanovic ◽  
Ivan Popovic

Existing government air quality monitoring networks consist of static measurement stations, which are highly reliable and accurately measure a wide range of air pollutants, but they are very large, expensive and require significant amounts of maintenance. As a promising solution, low-cost sensors are being introduced as complementary, air quality monitoring stations. These sensors are, however, not reliable due to the lower accuracy, short life cycle and corresponding calibration issues. Recent studies have shown that low-cost sensors are affected by relative humidity and temperature. In this paper, we explore methods to additionally improve the calibration algorithms with the aim to increase the measurement accuracy considering the impact of temperature and humidity on the readings, by using machine learning. A detailed comparative analysis of linear regression, artificial neural network and random forest algorithms are presented, analyzing their performance on the measurements of CO, NO2 and PM10 particles, with promising results and an achieved R2 of 0.93–0.97, 0.82–0.94 and 0.73–0.89 dependent on the observed period of the year, respectively, for each pollutant. A comprehensive analysis and recommendations on how low-cost sensors could be used as complementary monitoring stations to the reference ones, to increase spatial and temporal measurement resolution, is provided.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonu Kumar Jha ◽  
Mohit Kumar ◽  
Vipul Arora ◽  
Sachchida Nand Tripathi ◽  
Vidyanand Motiram Motghare ◽  
...  

<div>Air pollution is a severe problem growing over time. A dense air-quality monitoring network is needed to update the people regarding the air pollution status in cities. A low-cost sensor device (LCSD) based dense air-quality monitoring network is more viable than continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations (CAAQMS). An in-field calibration approach is needed to improve agreements of the LCSDs to CAAQMS. The present work aims to propose a calibration method for PM2.5 using domain adaptation technique to reduce the collocation duration of LCSDs and CAAQMS. A novel calibration approach is proposed in this work for the measured PM2.5 levels of LCSDs. The dataset used for the experimentation consists of PM2.5 values and other parameters (PM10, temperature, and humidity) at hourly duration over a period of three months data. We propose new features, by combining PM2.5, PM10, temperature, and humidity, that significantly improved the performance of calibration. Further, the calibration model is adapted to the target location for a new LCSD with a collocation time of two days. The proposed model shows high correlation coefficient values (R2) and significantly low mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) than that of other baseline models. Thus, the proposed model helps in reducing the collocation time while maintaining high calibration performance.</div>


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