Environmental health is receiving essential attention across the globe finally. Growing industrial production, lifestyle changes, and deforestation is affecting environmental health significantly. Some organizations are putting their best efforts to alarm the world about ecological health. Therefore, it is critical for smart cities to protect environmental conditions. The first step towards a better environment is monitoring air in various parts of the city. Air quality monitoring data can help identify the root causes of pollution. Sensing Air quality can play a vital role in making smart cities healthier.
Air Quality Monitoring: First Step Towards Pure Air In Smart Cities
Major metropolitan cities across the world are slowly observing significant air pollution. The growth of smart cities is based on the concept of improving the quality of life. Therefore, it is essential for smart cities to monitor the environment across the city. The collection of insightful data is the first step towards solving the challenge. Observing the air quality of different areas can be helpful to identify patterns and sources of pollution. Once found, authorities can introduce corrective measures to reduce or eliminate air pollution.
There are different sources of air pollution that smart cities can address one after another. Various sources of emission include pollution from vehicular air, residential air, and industrial air. In addition to that, smart cities can separately monitor unique sites such as airports, thermal power plants, forests, and even volcanic eruption areas. Different sources contribute to various air pollutants.
The Solution: How To Monitor Air Quality?
Air quality can be measured with embedded hardware solutions comprising air quality sensors. Various sensors are useful to monitor specific pollutants. These air quality monitoring systems can monitor pollution with VOC, COx, NO2, SOx, O3, PM2.5, and PM10. Additionally, these systems can monitor parameters like temperature, humidity, and ambient pressure.
Moreover, air quality monitoring leverages wireless communication to send data to the central cloud architecture. The Internet of Things would allow authorities to collect air quality statistics from various areas. This data can further be analyzed against the threshold amount of pollutants. Authorities can inspect if any particular area reports alerting amount of pollutants. Such tracing would cease any unchecked air pollution in cities.
Furthermore, air quality sensors may use several other additional provisions. These monitoring systems can power from solar energy to support power needs remotely. Additionally, these sensors require a robust build to support various environmental conditions and harsh treatments. Majorly, they can leverage IP65 mechanical housing for standard device protection. Being small in size and low-cost would make air quality monitoring systems even more viable.
For end-users, they can access the air quality data in their smartphones or PCs with appropriate visualization. This visualization would make the process of data interpretation convenient with relevant notifications based on set thresholds. Some consumer products already offer similar user interfaces through a smartphone app, a web app, or a display device.
Challenges For Air Quality Monitoring
Air quality monitoring is one of the applications where accuracy and reliability are important. Therefore, air quality monitoring systems require calibration at a certain interval for better accuracy. Unlike other applications, air quality sensing lacks the existence of data standards. It makes air quality sensing even harder for smart cities. Also, interpreting the air quality data is a tough part for users, as data has to be interpreted for particular area conditions. These challenges for accuracy and validity create quite a scope for maturity for air quality monitoring systems.
Clear Conclusion
Air quality monitoring is crucial beyond just user convenience or ease. Cleaner air indoors or outdoors positively affects the health of the entire city and environment. Indirectly, air quality would affect every application for the user. A handful of indoor air quality monitoring systems are already in implementation globally. Therefore, it is just a matter of time before air quality monitoring systems are functional in most major cities.
Furthermore, air quality purification would also go hand in hand with these monitoring systems. Identification of air pollutants will be followed with cleansing or nullification of them. This initiative and direction towards environmental health will soon gain more attraction in the years to come. They are allowing the growth of technology in harmony with environmental care.
Develop great IoT solutions for intelligent Smart Cities with high quality software, devices and infrastructures. Contact us!
