A Portable Personalized Environmental Quality Monitoring System (PONG) Version 3

Poor environmental quality remains a global issue that affects most of the world’s population. Environmental quality refers not only to air quality but also physical qualities, such as temperature and noise pollution. The goal of our work is to develop technologies that allow personal monitoring of environmental quality and provide this information in real time to the user or a group of users. Here, we report on our third generation of Personalized envirONmental quality monitorinG system (PONG). It measures ten environmental and air quality parameters for both indoor and outdoor uses. The unit was constructed to be portable and clip into belts/bags and so on, communicating with a simplified version of the mobile phone app (for simpler user interaction) and central website. The app combines all the readings to create an “Environmental Score,” which gives a simple way to understand reading for the user. The unit was extensively tested at different times/locations within Coventry, U.K., and showed that weekends generally exposed users to a more polluted environment.