A cheap and third-age-friendly home device for monitoring indoor air quality

Nowadays, thanks to the hardware costs reduction everyone at home owns at least one hi-technology devices to support life quality. This paper proposes a new methodology to analyse the indoor air quality with a cheap and third-age-dedicated device. A new prototype, called Home Pollution Embedded System (HOPES), was developed to give simple and understandable information, also comprehensible for people with cognitive problems or that are not familiar with new technologies. The device gathers pollutants data and displays to the user different air pollutants concentrations, from toxics gasses up to explosives. Moreover, an overall air quality index has been elaborated and is displayed by HOPES with lights and numerical information. HOPES is an Internet of things device that works in real time and that can be connected to the web and to a geographic information system platform to add spatial information of each pollutant. The hardware architecture employs a set of gas semiconductor sensors and an IR particulate matter sensor. Experimental results demonstrated that HOPES has an accurate sensor response and is suitable to be used with the proposed indices. In fact, despite of the poor-selective metal oxide sensors, the results highlighted how it is possible to get useful air quality information with a cheap device. However, the system needs more tests to validate the sensors array with different substances.

[1]  Liviu Iftode,et al.  Real-time air quality monitoring through mobile sensing in metropolitan areas , 2013, UrbComp '13.

[2]  L Parmeggiani,et al.  Encyclopaedia of occupational health and safety. , 1984, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[3]  Sun-Kuk Noh,et al.  Design of a Room Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2013, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[4]  Dirk Müller,et al.  Estimation of odour intensity of indoor air pollutants from building materials with a multi-gas sensor system , 2010 .

[5]  Ching-Biau Tzeng,et al.  Design and Implement a Cost Effective and Ubiquitous Air Quality Monitoring System Based on ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network , 2011, 2011 Second International Conference on Innovations in Bio-inspired Computing and Applications.

[6]  Amit Kumar,et al.  System engineering and deployment of envirobat An urban air pollution monitoring device , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (CONECCT).

[7]  David Zhang,et al.  A novel sensor feature extraction based on kernel entropy component analysis for discrimination of indoor air contaminants , 2015 .

[8]  Marina Almeida-Silva,et al.  Elderly exposure to indoor air pollutants , 2014 .

[9]  Qi Ye,et al.  Classification of multiple indoor air contaminants by an electronic nose and a hybrid support vector machine , 2012 .

[10]  Gianfranco Manes,et al.  A Wireless Sensor Network for Precise Volatile Organic Compound Monitoring , 2012, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[11]  Kavi Kumar Khedo,et al.  A Wireless Sensor Network Air Pollution Monitoring System , 2010, ArXiv.

[12]  F. Cumo,et al.  Air quality in Italian small harbours: a proposed assessment methodology , 2013, Rendiconti Lincei.

[13]  A. J. Gandolfi,et al.  A Wearable and Wireless Sensor System for Real-Time Monitoring of Toxic Environmental Volatile Organic Compounds , 2009, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[14]  Lin Wu,et al.  A PEFKS- and CP-ABE-Based Distributed Security Scheme in Interest-Centric Opportunistic Networks , 2013, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[15]  Da-Jeng Yao,et al.  A gas sensing system for indoor air quality control and polluted environmental monitoring , 2009, 2009 9th IEEE Conference on Nanotechnology (IEEE-NANO).

[16]  Michele Magno,et al.  Design, characterization and management of a wireless sensor network for smart gas monitoring , 2011, 2011 4th IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces (IWASI).

[17]  Heiko Ulmer,et al.  Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Improving Air Quality Perception , 2012 .

[18]  Jaime Herrán,et al.  Performance of a CO2 Impedimetric Sensor Prototype for Air Quality Monitoring , 2011, Sensors.

[19]  Ren-Guey Lee,et al.  Development and Implementation of Wireless Multigas Concentration Cloud System , 2014 .

[20]  Jing Liu,et al.  Influences of ambient air PM₂.₅ concentration and meteorological condition on the indoor PM₂.₅ concentrations in a residential apartment in Beijing using a new approach. , 2015, Environmental pollution.

[21]  Malcom M. Renfew.  NIOSH Pocket guide to chemical hazards (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) , 1991 .

[22]  Ali Asghar Alesheikh,et al.  Providing interoperability for air quality in-situ sensors observations using GML technology , 2005 .

[23]  Fabio Nardecchia,et al.  Home smart grid device for energy saves and failure monitoring , 2015, 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering (EEEIC).

[24]  Hojung Cha,et al.  Micro Sensor Node for Air Pollutant Monitoring: Hardware and Software Issues , 2009, Sensors.

[25]  E. Seto,et al.  A distributed network of low-cost continuous reading sensors to measure spatiotemporal variations of PM2.5 in Xi'an, China. , 2015, Environmental pollution.

[26]  Eric Paulos,et al.  InAir: sharing indoor air quality measurements and visualizations , 2010, CHI.

[27]  A. Bartoňová,et al.  On the use of small and cheaper sensors and devices for indicative citizen-based monitoring of respirable particulate matter. , 2015, Environmental pollution.

[28]  Madjid Abbaspour,et al.  Air Quality Risk Index (AQRI) and its application for a megacity , 2015, International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology.

[29]  H. Frommea,et al.  Particulate matter in the indoor air of classrooms — exploratory results from Munich and surrounding area , 2006 .