Realtime Air Quality Monitoring

Humans need oxygen to live and it is provided by the air we breathe in. Air as essential to life it is, its quality on the same hand defines the purity of oxygen that gets to our lungs. Not only does the poor air quality threatens the life of humans, but it also adversely effects the life of animals

Project Title

Realtime Air Quality Monitoring

Project Area of Specialization

Internet of Things

Project Summary

Humans need oxygen to live and it is provided by the air we breathe in. Air as essential to life it is, its quality on the same hand defines the purity of oxygen that gets to our lungs. Not only does the poor air quality threatens the life of humans, but it also adversely effects the life of animals as well as plants. In our modern fast-paced industrialized world, the quality of air is mostly effected by two major factors that includes Ozone and particle pollution, where the former builds up a smog causing difficulties in breathing, the latter causes long-term lung diseases which is also associated to heart attacks in humans. Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA) releases Air Quality Indexes (AQI) worldwide where alerts and forecasts are mostly based on centralized monitoring stations. However, with current urbanization and lifestyle with more machines and industries integrated into our society, the carbon and particle emissions further intensify the problems giving rise to Urban Heat Islands (UHI) and rapid fluctuations in Air Quality around us. This project aims to deploy low-cost, high accuracy Realtime Air Quality Monitoring System (RAQMS) in fixed as well as mobile deployments, where real-time AQI are measured and transmitted to centralized system. The real-time information can be shared with local councils, urban development agencies as well as EPAs to better plan the infrastructure to reduce carbon footprint and improve the air quality.  
 

Project Objectives

• To survey sites (urban/rural) for point of interests where RAQMS must be deployed

• Design of Long-range ambient static nodes with support of active and low-power 
operational modes

• Design of mobile-ambient nodes for distributed and crowd-sourced sensing 
applications

• Cloud configuration of database, application and dense computing node for data 
processing

• Analytics engine deployment for data filtration and output connectivity interface

• Resource Hub creation assisting the dataset modeling that can be later used for 
predictive and machine learning analysis for future projects 

Project Implementation Method

A robust deployment scenario will be established where the monitoring nodes will be deployed in a heterogeneous configuration ranging from static to mobile as well as high sensor distributed nodes. These nodes will vary slightly in their configuration keeping in mind the cost of development, cost of deployment, area of operation, accuracy of sensed data and technology to transmit the information in real-time.  
The mobile nodes will be equipped with 3G/4G internet enabled modules that can transmit the sensor information directly to the cloud, thus avoiding intermittent delays, dependence on gateway devices as the network coverage is significant in urban areas. These mobile nodes will carry the most important sensors including temperature, particle and metal oxide sensors to measure the carbon and other dangerous harmful particles in the air. With temperature readings and GPS co-ordinates, a real-time map of air quality can be generated in different parts of the city. These low-power nodes will also be deployed to highway junctions, motorways and other densely populated areas such as office sectors to measure the urban heat island (UHI) effect generated due to traffic congestion and thus, the vehicle emissions and heat. The UHI not only generates high volume of particle emission in a closed vicinity but it also raises the temperature of an area which further fluctuates the air quality abruptly. The mobile nodes will also help to generate the heat map along with traffic congestion maps that can be modeled by future Intelligent Transportation Departments in designing the traffic patterns and secondary routes while planning smarter traffic engineering.  
It is very interesting to know that with the current capability of low-power devices and System on Chip capabilities, multiple sensors can be configured on a simple small form factor board which can be used in designing a small low-cost, low-power node. As we have seen an increasing trend in use of technology, sensors and gadgets by end consumers for fitness as well as well-being applications, it is projected that these devices will be adopted by commuters and will help to generate a crowd-sourced air quality monitoring network that will not only increase the real-time data collection but will greatly improve the spatial resolution of AQI of a certain region of interest.  
 

Benefits of the Project

Some of the goals that are normally set by any Air Quality Monitoring system must include: 
• Pollution Levels estimation

• Publish pollution data to general public

• Implementation of Air Quality goals and standards

• Provide information on Air Quality Trends

• Share data and interfaces to design air quality models

• Support Research 
 

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

It is very interesting to know that with the current capability of low-power devices and System on Chip capabilities, multiple sensors can be configured on a simple small form factor board which can be used in designing a small low-cost, low-power node. As we have seen an increasing trend in use of technology, sensors and gadgets by end consumers for fitness as 
well as well-being applications, it is projected that these devices will be adopted by commuters and will help to generate a crowd-sourced air quality monitoring network that will not only increase the real-time data collection but will greatly improve the spatial resolution of AQI of a certain region of interest.  
The static nodes on the other hand will be equipped with host of sensors ranging from wind speed, light, temperature, metal-oxide, eletro-chemical and particle flow sensors to model the vicinity in a more comprehensive manner. Typically, these static nodes will be deployed in critical area of interests such as Schools, Universities, Hospitals, Elderly care, urban residential complexes and community centers to generate the heat maps based on air quality. These monitoring stations will be equipped with low-power long-range radio technologies that can sense and transmit the information to distributed gateways deployed in a grid fashion separated by 5 – 10 Kilometers away, thus efficiently mapping councils, administrative units and therefore, the entire city. The static nodes will also have improved computation power and can perform some functions such as data aggregation and filtering locally, so that it can be efficiently shared with gateways. These gateways will serve as an interface to connect to other air quality monitoring systems and share the information with local authorities.  
Finally, a cloud-based solution will be deployed that will store the incoming data from static as well as mobile nodes and can be processed in real-time using dense nodes computation available in the cloud. A cloud analytics engine will be deployed to analyze and project these real-time values. These air quality information trends can be further published to website for general public as well shared with local and federal authorities for research and planning. The data set from these devices will be curated and presented in a general public domain for researchers and organizations for continued research and planning.  

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Health

Other Industries

IT

Core Technology

Internet of Things (IoT)

Other Technologies

Clean Tech

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Climate Action

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com