Participatory Air Quality and Urban Heat Islands Monitoring System

Abstract

The widespread use of low-cost environmental monitoring systems, together with recent developments in the design of Internet of Things architectures and protocols, has given new impetus to smart city applications. Such progress should, in particular, considerably improve the fine characterization of a wide range of physical quantities within our cities. Indeed, the cost-effectiveness of these emerging sensors combined with their reduced size allows for high-density deployments resulting in higher spatial granularity. In this article, we briefly present the 3M’Air project that aims to explore the potential of participatory citizen measures using low-cost sensors in order to improve the local knowledge of air quality and temperature and then bridge the gap between individual exposure and regional measurements. We then present the design, implementation, and evaluation of our low-cost, small-size wireless sensor network (WSN)-based participatory monitoring system. This system is composed of mobile sensing nodes measuring temperature, humidity, and a number of pollutants (NO2, PM1, PM2.5, and PM10). The collected data are sent to a server for analysis and building temperature and air quality maps. To validate our platform, we have carried out multiple tests to compare our sensor nodes to reference stations and to each other. We have also evaluated the energy consumption of our nodes under different configurations. The results are satisfactory and show that our nodes can be used in environmental participatory monitoring.