This scoping review is focused on wearable devices for environmental monitoring. First, the main pollutants are presented, followed by sensing technologies that are used for the parameters of interest. Selected examples of wearables and portables are divided into commercially available and research-level projects. While many commercial products are in fact portable, there is an increasing interest in using a completely wearable technology. This allows us to correlate the pollution level to other personal information (performed activity, position, and respiratory parameters) and thus to estimate personal exposure to given pollutants. The fact that there are no univocal indices to estimate outdoor or indoor air quality is also an open problem. Finally, applications of wearables for environmental monitoring are discussed. Combining environmental monitoring with other devices would permit better choices of where to perform sports activities, especially in highly polluted areas, and provide detailed information on the living conditions of individuals.

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A Scoping Review on Wearable Devices for Environmental Monitoring and Their Application for Health and Wellness

Cities today encounter significant challenges pertaining to urbanization and population growth, resource availability, and climate change. Concurrently, unparalleled datasets are generated through Internet of Things (IoT) sensing implemented at urban, building, and personal scales that serve as a potential tool for understanding and overcoming these issues. Focusing on air pollution and thermal exposure challenges in cities, we reviewed and summarized the literature on IoT environmental sensing on urban, building, and human scales, presenting the first integrated assessment of IoT solutions from the data convergence perspective on all three scales. We identified that there is a lack of guidance on what to measure, where to measure, how frequently to measure, and standards for the acceptable measurement quality on all scales of application. The current literature review identified a significant disconnect between applications on each scale. Currently, the research primarily considers urban, building, and personal scale in isolation, leading to significant data underutilization. We addressed the scientific and technological challenges and opportunities related to data convergence across scales and detailed future directions of IoT sensing along with short- and long-term research and engineering needs. IoT application on a personal scale and integration of information on all scales opens up the possibility of developing personal thermal comfort and exposure models. The development of personal models is a vital promising area that offers significant advancements in understanding the relationship between environment and people that requires significant further research.

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Transformational IoT sensing for air pollution and thermal exposures

Air quality in and around ships is governed by a variety of pollution sources that are unique for the shipping context. This makes the living and working conditions on ships substantially different from situations in cities or inside buildings. To gain insight into these differences, information about trends and absolute pollutant amounts on board ships is needed. However, the installation of reference instruments to monitor NO2, NO, O3, particulate matter and other environmental parameters is often not possible because of their size, weight or because of safety reasons. For that reason, more compact devices incorporating a variety of sensors are a good alternative. However, the use of such sensors is only possible when their behaviour and performance in a shipping context are well understood. To study this context, we were allowed to compare sensor-based measurements performed on a 36-year old ship dedicated to near shore operations with measurements of reference-grade instruments. Additional behavioural information of sensors is obtained by measuring campaigns organized on several inland ships. This contribution demonstrates that trends registered by gas and particulate matter sensors are reliable but that insufficient detection limits, higher noise, imperfect calibration and sensor errors result in some reliability constraints.

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Reliability of Lower-Cost Sensors in the Analysis of Indoor Air Quality on Board Ships

Air quality measurements usually consist of ground-based instrumentation at fixed locations. However, vertical profiles of pollutants are of interest for understanding processes, distribution, dilution and concentration. Therefore, a multicopter system has been developed to investigate the vertical distribution of the concentration of aerosol particles, black carbon, ozone, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide and the meteorological parameters of temperature and humidity. This article presents the requirements by different users, the setup of the quadrocopter system, the instrumentation and the results of first applications. The vertical distribution of particulate matter next to a highway was strongly related to atmospheric stratification, with different concentrations below and above the temperature inversion present in the morning. After the qualification phase described in this article, two identically equipped multicopters will be used upwind and downwind of line or diffuse sources such as highways or urban areas to quantify the influence of their emissions on the local air quality.

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MesSBAR—Multicopter and Instrumentation for Air Quality Research

Poor air quality is a global problem that affects human health and ecosystems all over the world. For that reason, many countries invest in networks of reference monitoring stations that measure air quality in real time. However, the high installation and maintenance costs of these stations mean that smaller cities or underdeveloped regions are less covered by such stations. In these regions, alternative detection technologies such as low-cost monitoring systems can be used instead. Unfortunately, the results of such monitoring devices are often questioned by academics. This contribution proposes the design of an air quality monitoring system where cost and reliability have been optimized from a hardware point of view. In addition, the device has been coupled to an IoT platform so that inexperienced users can view and share the collected information The design of affordable systems increases the ability to perform ad hoc analysis at the level of neighborhoods or cities by citizen science organizations or governmental entities. 

Design of a Low-Cost System for the Measurement of Variables Associated With Air Quality

Low-cost sensors (LCS) are becoming popular for air quality monitoring (AQM). They promise high spatial and temporal resolutions at low-cost. In addition, citizen science applications such as personal exposure monitoring can be implemented effortlessly. However, the reliability of the data is questionable due to various error sources involved in the LCS measurement. Furthermore, sensor performance drift over time is another issue. Hence, the adoption of LCS by regulatory agencies is still evolving. Several studies have been conducted to improve the performance of low-cost sensors. This article summarizes the existing studies on the state-of-the-art of LCS for AQM. We conceptualize a step by step procedure to establish a sustainable AQM setup with LCS that can produce reliable data. The selection of sensors, calibration and evaluation, hardware setup, evaluation metrics and inferences, and end user-specific applications are various stages in the LCS-based AQM setup we propose. We present a critical analysis at every step of the AQM setup to obtain reliable data from the low-cost measurement. Finally, we conclude this study with future scope to improve the availability of air quality data.

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Mannam Veera Narayana

Papers

Establishing A Sustainable Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring Setup: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art