Developing a Secure Low-Cost Radon Monitoring System

Abstract

Radon gas has been declared a human carcinogen by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Several studies carried out in Spain highlighted the high radon concentrations in several regions, with Galicia (northwestern Spain) being one of the regions with the highest radon concentrations. The objective of this work was to create a safe and low-cost radon monitoring and alert system, based on open source technologies. To achieve this objective, the system uses devices, a collection of sensors with a processing unit and a communication module, and a backend, responsible for managing all the information, predicting radon levels and issuing alerts using open source technologies. Security is one of the largest challenges for the internet of things, and it is utterly important in the current scenario, given that high radon concentrations pose a health risk. For this reason, this work focuses on securing the entire end-to-end communication path to avoid data forging. The results of this work indicate that the development of a low-cost, yet secured, radon monitoring system is feasible, allowing one to create a network of sensors that can help mitigate the health hazards that high radon concentrations pose.

An Internet of Thing Architecture Based on Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol and Node-RED: A Case Study for Monitoring Radon Gas

“…They do not use lightweight messaging protocols. In [13], MQTT is used to transmit the data and generate the alerts, and the data processing is implemented using Node-RED in the server. Although two types of access networks, WiFi and Sigfox, are considered, the infrastructure responsible for receiving, processing and storing the data have been designed with security aspects in mind.…”

“…In [12], the authors use the IoT edge device, LoRaWAN network and RESTful API to send the data. The authors in [13] present a secure and complex architecture of radon monitoring using two communication technologies: WiFi and Sigfox. MQTT is used to send alerts of high radon concentration, and Node-RED is used to process the data.…”

RnProbe: A LoRa-Enabled IoT Edge Device for Integrated Radon Risk Management

“…The work details the monitoring process based on a custom silicon chip that detects the alpha particles produced by the decay of radon and uses a microcontroller with a built-in wireless transceiver to transmit multiple parameters to a backend application. More recently, Alvarellos [29] published work focusing on the development of a secure low-cost radon monitoring system using Wi-Fi or Sigfox for communication. The solution measures radon concentration every 10 minutes and temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and IAQ every 5 seconds.…”

Designing an Indoor Radon Risk Exposure Indicator (IRREI): An Evaluation Tool for Risk Management and Communication in the IoT Age

“…Currently, several IoT-based Radon monitoring architectures are being proposed [39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Typically, these devices are designed for online monitoring, i.e., Radon levels are continuously collected and communicated to a cloud for further analytics, and after reasoning, specific mitigation actions can be performed.…”