A wireless sensor network for urban environmental health monitoring: UrbanSense

Abstract

Urban areas are generators of environmental emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2), harmful air pollutants and noise, all with the potential to negatively impact the health and wellbeing of its human and non-human inhabitants. There is an urgent need to understand the characteristics of urban areas associated with variability in emissions and the potential for exposure to potential harmful environmental conditions. UrbanSense is a wireless sensor network (WSN) infrastructure designed to monitor environmental conditions at different temporal and spatial scales. The scalable infrastructure includes an extended range outdoor wireless sensing and data aggregation system, a web-based data management and visualization platform, and real-time event-based data stream integration. Sensors monitor changes in carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), noise (LAeq), as well as several meteorological conditions including wind speed and direction, temperature, relative humidity and precipitation. The implementation will provide opportunities for real-time data integration and an analysis system for environmental quality assessment, and may be realized on top of products arising from spatio-temporal (statistical) analyses and remotely-acquired data products such as satellite data. Sensor swapping and co-location with sensors from projects with different aims (traffic volume modelling and human tracking research) will add value for research in transportation planning, environmental regulation and policy and epidemiological studies focused on associations between environmental exposures and health outcomes.