Towards an integrated framework for air quality monitoring and exposure estimation—a review

Abstract

For the health and safety of the public, it is essential to measure spatiotemporal distribution of air pollution in a region and thus monitor air quality in a fine-grain manner. While most of the sensing-based commercial applications available until today have been using fixed environmental sensors, the use of personal devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, and other wearable devices has not been explored in depth. These kinds of devices have an advantage of being with the user continuously, thus providing an ability to generate accurate and well-distributed spatiotemporal air pollution data. In this paper, we review the studies (especially in the last decade) done by various researchers using different kinds of environmental sensors highlighting related techniques and issues. We also present important studies of measuring impact and emission of air pollution on human beings and also discuss models using which air pollution inhalation can be associated to humans by quantifying personal exposure with the use of human activity detection. The overarching aim of this review is to provide novel and key ideas that have the potential to drive pervasive and individual centric and yet accurate pollution monitoring techniques which can scale up to the future needs.

Wearable Devices for Environmental Monitoring in the Built Environment: A Systematic Review

“… The “AND NOT” operator (in orange) was used to exclude documents that contain the term specified in the search: “proton exchange membrane” or “fuel cell”, since the acronym PEMS in Section 2 can be misleading because it can refer to a portable environmental monitoring system but also to “proton exchange membranes”, which is often associated with “fuel cell” (the related correct acronym is PEMs with lowercase “s”, but Scopus’ search engine takes into account lemmatisation, that is the process of grouping the inflected forms of a term). The operator OR, associated with the acronym EID, which stands for “Electronic IDentifier” and is a unique alphanumeric string created to identify a record in Scopus, was used to add some other documents, not already considered and derived mainly from the biography screening of both other literature reviews [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ] and the extracted papers derived from Scopus searches with query consisting of Sections 1–5 and 8 of the overall query structure here presented ( Figure 2 ). The operator AND NOT associated with EID was used to exclude some other documents that do not match the research purpose.…”

“…6. The operator OR, associated with the acronym EID, which stands for "Electronic IDentifier" and is a unique alphanumeric string created to identify a record in Scopus, was used to add some other documents, not already considered and derived mainly from the biography screening of both other literature reviews [18][19][20][21][22][23] and the extracted papers derived from Scopus searches with query consisting of Sections 1-5 and 8 of the overall query structure here presented (Figure 2). Figure 2 shows how eight concatenated sections characterise the overall structure of the query:…”

“…In [18,19], the authors performed an extensive literature review of low-cost sensing technologies for air quality monitoring and exposure assessment and for monitoring air pollution and physical activity using sensors. In [20], the authors reviewed miniaturised sensors to measure airborne gasses and Particulate Matter (PM).…”

Mitigation strategies for reducing air pollution

“…In this context, the authorities should support new technologies for air pollution monitoring (Mishra et al 2015). Air pollution monitoring networks offer the possibility to measure the spatiotemporal distribution of air pollution in the urban environment for the health and safety of citizens (Singla et al 2018) (Sofia et al 2018a). For example, sensor networks offer the potential to focus on air pollution monitoring reflecting high spatial and temporal variability in pollutant levels (Knox et al 2013) (Sofia et al 2018b).…”

Hardware Design and Building of Industrial Environment Monitoring System

“…In [14] authors reviewed the studies used different kinds of environmental sensors and highlighted related techniques to provide ideas that have the potential to drive an accurate pollution monitoring technique for the future usages. In [15] the design utilized different engineering concepts obtained from various engineering fields to suggest a new industrial environment monitoring system design that featured with a real time, reliable and efficient capabilities.…”