Experimental Study of Real-Time Comprehensive Indoor Air Quality

Abstract

The growing concern about IAQ has accelerated the development of small, low cost Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring systems. These are capable of monitoring various indoor air pollutants in real-time. However, since most IAQ monitoring systems present the sensed value of the corresponding pollutant as a number, when we read the sensor values it is difficult for not experts but normal users to identify how polluted the air is or what is the pollution criteria of each pollutant. Therefore, for ambient air quality, a comprehensive Air Quality Index (AQI) is already being used in a number of nations to present the polluted level of the air, and thereby people can identify the current status of air quality easily. Nevertheless, since the index calculation is based on ambient air pollutants, and the index presents a section mean of sensed values collected for 1 or 24 h, the AQI used for presenting ambient air quality is not suitable for IAQ representation. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an experiment that applies the AQI directly to IAQ monitoring system that we developed, and derive some problems through the result analysis.