A low-cost air quality monitoring system based on Internet of Things for smart homes

Abstract

Global climate change and COVID-19 have changed our social and business life. People spend most of their daily lives indoors. Low-cost devices can monitor indoor air quality (IAQ) and reduce health problems caused by air pollutants. This study proposes a real-time and low-cost air quality monitoring system for smart homes based on Internet of Things (IoT). The developed IoT-based monitoring system is portable and provides users with real-time data transfer about IAQ. During the COVID-19 period, air quality data were collected from the kitchen, bedroom and balcony of their home, where a family of 5 spend most of their time. As a result of the analyzes, it has been determined that indoor particulate matter is mainly caused by outdoor infiltration and cooking emissions, and the CO2 value can rise well above the permissible health limits in case of insufficient ventilation due to night sleep activity. The obtained results show that the developed measuring devices may be suitable for measurement-based indoor air quality management. In addition, the proposed low-cost measurement system compared to existing systems; It has advantages such as modularity, scalability, low cost, portability, easy installation and open-source technologies.

Evaluating Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Devices for Healthy Homes

“…In conclusion, in the forty-two papers reviewed for this paper, the main findings were that: published papers comparing accuracy go out of date very quickly due to the changing availability of the monitors; there seems to be a focus on accuracy even though this is not necessarily the most relevant parameter in a study for consumer products; and there seems to be a lack of field studies testing how the devices work over time. Some studies have looked at how these devices are used in residential environments [22,23]. Only a few published studies compared multiple units of one device, and only a few compared findings to actual indoor environments to gain an understanding of consumer-specific needs such as smartphone data visualization, and availability of data access.…”

Internet of Things (IoT)-based indoor plant care system

“…The lowest humidity is 33% (11.2 days) in September and the highest humidity is 99% (30.7 days) in March. The comfort level for humidity is rated as sultry, oppressive or unbearable for at least 49% of the time, spread over 7.8 months, from December 4 to July 30 [28].…”

“…Regarding the hardware, Arduino-compatible hardware was used. Some of the hardware components were already available to the project team, and the others were easily acquired, at reasonably low prices [28].…”

“…Moreover, the work here presented is directly related to UN's SDG3 and intends to contribute to improve indoor air quality, trying to reduce the emission of polluting gases from indoors to outdoors, with the aim of achieving a cleaner and healthier environment [28]. In fact, what good would a city with all the characteristics of a smart city [4,18] be if pollution is the norm there?…”

Iot System for Acquiring Ambient Data Using a Dedicated Portable Platform

“…These devices can efficiently collect environmental data and store it in cloud storage. The authors developed a surveillance system in [9] to gather environmental data from three specific sections of an apartment. The system comprises an ESP8266 microcontroller with WiFi functionality, which gathers ambient data from an AHT10 temperature and humidity sensor, an MH-Z19A CO2 detection sensor, and a PMS7003 air quality monitoring sensor.…”