Enviro-IoT: Calibrating Low-Cost Environmental Sensors in Urban Settings

TL;DR

Enviro-IoT is a low-cost, IoT-enabled sensor system designed for urban air quality monitoring, validated over 9 months with high accuracy against industry standards, demonstrating its potential for widespread environmental sensing.

Contribution

This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of Enviro-IoT, a novel low-cost sensor system for urban air quality monitoring using IoT technology.

Findings

Achieved 98% accuracy for PM2.5 measurement

Achieved 97% accuracy for PM10 and NO2 measurements

Validated low-cost sensors against research-grade instruments over 9 months

Abstract

Low-cost miniaturised sensors offer significant advantage to monitor the environment in real-time and accurately. The area of air quality monitoring has attracted much attention in recent years because of the increasing impacts on the environment and more personally to human health and mental wellbeing. Rapid growth in sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is paving the way for low-cost systems to transform global monitoring of air quality. Drawing on 4 years of development work, in this paper we outline the design, implementation and analysis of \textit{Enviro-IoT} as a step forward to monitoring air quality levels within urban environments by means of a low-cost sensing system. An in-the-wild study for 9-months was performed to evaluate the Enviro-IoT system against industry standard equipment is performed with accuracy for measuring Particulate Matter 2.5, 10 and Nitrogen Dioxide achieving 98\%, 97\% and 97\% respectively. The results in this case study are made up Of 57, 120 which highlight that it is possible to take advantage of low-cost sensors coupled with IoT technologies to validate the Enviro-IoT device against research-grade industrial instruments.