IoT enabled proactive indoor air quality monitoring system for sustainable health management

In recent times indoor air quality has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers as an important similar to that of external air pollution. In certain sense, indoor air quality must be paid more attention than outdoor air quality as people spend more time indoors than outdoors. The indoor environments are confined and closed compared to external environments providing less opportunity for the pollutants to dilute. With the advancement of technology, working places have become more automated using machines to carry out the tasks that were hitherto done manually. These devices emit various solids and gases into the environment during their operation. These emissions contain many substances that are harmful to human health, when exposed to them for a prolonged period of time or more than certain levels of concentration. This paper proposes an IoT based indoor air quality monitoring system for tracking the ozone concentrations near a photocopy machine. The experimental system with a semiconductor sensor capable of monitoring ozone concentrations was installed near a high volume photocopier. The IoT device has been programmed to collect and transmit data at an interval of five minutes over blue tooth connection to a gateway node that in turn communicates with the processing node via the WiFi local area network. The sensor was calibrated using the standard calibration methods. As an additional capability, the proposed air pollution monitoring system can generate warnings when the pollution level exceeds beyond a predetermined threshold value.