Low-cost Air Quality System for Urban Area Monitoring

With the worldwide urban population following a continuous growth, more individuals expose themselves to a less healthy environment by inhaling polluted urban air. The current pollution measurement techniques make use of automated monitoring stations that are usually installed in certain key points around the city but can only provide coarse-grained air quality reports as well as not being able to indicate the sources of the air polluting agents. As traffic related air pollution cannot be traced to a single location, there is the need for a new approach which has the capacity of measuring fine-grained air quality that can reflect any detailed variations that may be caused by traffic jams. In this paper, we intend to offer a solution by implementing a low-cost air quality system using mobile sensing for monitoring the variance of gaseous pollutants in metropolitan areas.