Wearable sensors for analyzing personal exposure to air pollution

This paper describes hardware developments in a wearable air quality sensor assembly for analyzing personal exposure to air pollution. According to the World Health Organization, exposure to air pollution is now the largest single environmental health risk globally, leading to approximately 7 million deaths in 2012 alone. Understanding personal exposure from traditional stationary and spatially disperse monitoring stations is challenging, particularly in urban environments with multiple pollutant sources and complex transport dynamics. Portable air quality sensors have the potential to fill in the gap left by traditional air pollution monitoring. Air pollution sensor technology is decreasing in cost and size, meaning it is now tenable to use low-cost portable air pollution sensors. The data collected by the wearable air quality sensor assembly, EnviroSensor 2.0, includes measurements of ozone, particulate matter, temperature, humidity, latitude, and longitude.