AirSense: A Portable Context-sensing Device for Personal Air Quality Monitoring

Yan Zhuang, Feng Lin, Eun-Hye Enki Yoo, Wenyao Xu

Abstract: Health effects attributed to air pollution, especially ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), become a global issue. The central environment monitoring networks provide limited spatial coverage and no contextual information. However, there is no solution to take contextual information, such as environmental and user behavioral factors, into account, which is highly associated to the variability of air quality level and the complex relationship between air quality and human activities. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a new context-sensing device for personal air quality monitoring, namely AirSense. AirSense is a portable and cost-effective platform, which is equipped with a dust sensor, a global position system (GPS) sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor, and an accelerometer sensor. The development of such a user-centered and geographical-information integrated platform enables us to collect fine-grained air quality along with contextual information. We evaluate the platform across a set of focused settings, such as the indoor vs outdoor, walking vs in-vehicle, moving vs stationary, and an environment with various levels of dust. Meanwhile, a user study is conducted to verify that AirSense is capatable of performing the ambient air quality monitoring in daily life. We also discuss several other applications with the new context-sensing platform.