The Use of Low-Cost Gas Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring with Smartphone Technology: A Preliminary Study

In the past decades, both low-cost gas sensors for air quality monitoring and smartphone devices have experienced a remarkable spread in the worldwide market. Smartphone devices have become a unique tool in everyday life, whilst the use of low-cost gas sensors in air quality monitors has allowed for a better understanding of the personal exposure to air pollutants. The traditional technologies for measuring air pollutant concentrations, even though they provide accurate data, cannot assure the necessary spatio-temporal resolution for assessing personal exposure to the various air pollutants. In this respect, one of the most promising solutions appears to be the use of smartphones together with the low-cost miniaturized gas sensors, because it allows for the monitoring of the air quality characterizing the different environments frequented in everyday life by leveraging the capability to perform mobile measurements. In this research, a handheld air quality monitor based on low-cost gas sensors capable of connecting to smartphone devices via Bluetooth link has been designed and implemented to explore the different ways of its use for assessing the personal exposure to air pollutants. For this purpose, two experiments were carried out: the first one was indoor monitoring of CO and NO2 concentrations performed in an apartment occupied by four individuals and the second one was mobile monitoring of CO and NO2 performed in a car cabin. During the indoor measurements, the maximum value for the CO concentrations was equal to 12.3 ppm, whilst the maximum value for NO2 concentrations was equal to 64 ppb. As concerns the mobile measurements, the maximum concentration of CO was equal to 8.3 ppm, whilst the maximum concentration of NO2 was equal to 38 ppb. This preliminary study has shown that this system can be potentially used in all those situations where the use of traditional chemical analyzers for measuring gas concentrations in everyday life environments is hardly feasible, but also has highlighted some limits concerning the performance of such systems.