Portable Instrumental Odour Monitoring System for Air Quality Monitoring by Citizens in Outdoor Environments

Abstract

Air pollution is a major contributor to the global disease burden. Scientific literature has been consistent for the past decades, exposing the dangers behind hazardous air quality in both indoor and outdoor environments, and its impact on human health and ecosystems. Conventional monitoring stations are expensive and bulky, limiting the spatiotemporal resolution of the provided data. For this reason, administrations are interested in adding low-cost sensors to the monitoring network, and thus obtaining measures from multiple sources to enhance the network’s density and coverage. In this work, we present a portable Instrumental Odour Monitoring System (IOMS) consisting of an electronic device with an array of metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) gas and Particle Matter sensors connected through Bluetooth with a smartphone with our own developed app that gathers data and sends it to a cloud. We tested the device in two different experimental setups, the first with laboratory-controlled conditions and the second in field, creating a network with the help of volunteers in the city of Barcelona.