Validating novel air pollution sensors to improve exposure estimates for epidemiological analyses and citizen science

Abstract

Low cost, personal air pollution sensors may reduce exposure measurement errors in epidemiological investigations and contribute to citizen science initiatives. Here we assess the validity of a low cost personal air pollution sensor. Study participants were drawn from two ongoing epidemiological projects in Barcelona, Spain. Participants repeatedly wore the pollution sensor - which measured carbon monoxide (CO), nitric oxide (NO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO). We also compared personal sensor measurements to those from more expensive instruments. Our personal sensors had moderate to high correlations with government monitors with averaging times of 1-h and 30-min epochs (r ~ 0.38-0.8) for NO and CO, but had low to moderate correlations with NO (~0.04-0.67). Correlations between the personal sensors and more expensive research instruments were higher than with the government monitors. The sensors were able to detect high and low air pollution levels in agreement with expectations (e.g., high levels on or near busy roadways and lower levels in background residential areas and parks). Our findings suggest that the low cost, personal sensors have potential to reduce exposure measurement error in epidemiological studies and provide valid data for citizen science studies.

Effects of personal air pollution exposure on asthma symptoms, lung function and airway inflammation

“…A further consideration for mobile monitoring is the sensor response time, which although relatively fast at between 1.5 and 4 minutes for Cairclip may still not be sufficient to detect very transient increases in air pollution exposure. Therefore, sensors used in future personal exposure studies should first undergo validation under realistic field conditions . Jaio et al found that Cairclip NO 2 /O 3 accurately measured the sum of NO 2 and O 3 (total oxidants) when compared against reference sensors .…”

Practical Field Calibration of Portable Monitors for Mobile Measurements of Multiple Air Pollutants

“…As a consequence, there has been considerable interest in the recent emergence of smaller, battery-operated instruments that can measure a range of air pollutants [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The lower capital cost, small size, and low power needs of these instruments have led to their deployment in large spatial networks [12][13][14] and in mobile and peripatetic (short periods of deployments at multiple sites) measurement designs [15][16][17][18][19], including in personal monitoring and 'citizen science' contexts [20][21][22][23].…”

Strategies of method selection for fine-scale PM<sub>2.5</sub> mapping in an intra-urban area using crowdsourced monitoring

“…In view of the above-mentioned reasons, we believe the hourly PM 2.5 concentration for the lightly polluted sampling period could generally disclose the air pollution variation in different urban micro-environments although the very-high-RH conditions (RH > 95 %) were not experienced in the evaluation period. For Period 2, the highconcentration environment may cause the underestimates of the low-cost sensor (Zheng et al, 2018;Johnson et al, 2018). However, the monitor experienced few high-concentration environments (> 160 µg m −3 ) for 29-31 December (i.e.…”