Air Quality through Automated Mobile Sensing and Wireless Sensor Networks for Enhanced Living Environments

Abstract

On one hand, humans typically spent about 90% of their time in indoor environments, therefore, indoor air quality is of the utmost importance as buildings have several sources of pollutants. On the other hand, the ageing of the global population presents a great opportunity for the development of solutions for ambient assisted living. The majority of existing air quality monitoring systems on the market are expensive, do not have direct forms of communication with the user, do not use social networks to share collected data and do not offer support for automated robots. This article presents iAirBot a standalone robot capable of monitoring indoor air quality. A gas sensor and a “Sun Spot” sensor network are used for monitoring air quality. Other sensors can be added to monitor specific pollutants. The results reveal not only that this automated mobile air monitoring solution is feasible as well as that indoor air quality may in some cases be very different from what would be expected. The proposed system can provide an effective form of interaction with the user. The authors believe that in the near future the company's robots will have APIs for data sharing in social networks as well as offer interconnection with indoor monitoring systems.