IoT Solution for Assessing the Indoor Air Quality of Educational Facilities

The indoor air quality and other environmental factors of education facilities, such as university lecture halls and dormitories, has been brought up lately as a factor severely influencing learning outcome. It was found also, that air quality metrics, such as CO2 level, temperature, humidity, noise, and illumination are far from optimal in facilities having sensor networks capable of capable of measuring such parameters, and in some cases, they are out of the range allowed by national standards. Unfortunately, there is very limited data available, and it is possible, that this problem is wide scale, but currently the lack of low-cost solutions to monitor these parameters makes it very hard to assess the situation. In the paper, we present an environmental monitoring solution based on the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, primarily for educational facilities, which can reproduce the system with minimal investment. The system based on low-cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless sensor boards and BLE-WIFI gateway using a ubiquitous single board computer (SBC) board. The software components are open source, as the BLE sensor board software is available from the manufacturer as an application example, the SBC uses Linux, and our software will be available as free, open-source software. The system does not only monitor these environmental parameters but can provide feedback for the occupants of the facility using LEDs on the sensor boars. We are going to present our preliminary results showing the applicability of our solution.