Environmental Monitoring with Focus on Emissions Using IoT Platform for Mobile Alert

There is an increased awareness of air pollution and pollution related sickness in communities around the world. With the widespread use of smart hand-held devices and ever increasing IoT functionalities in cities, it is easy to alert individuals about the prevailing environmental parameters, particularly those causing discomfort for certain individuals, e.g. asthma, allergy etc. The Norwegian governmental organization monitoring air quality, NILU has IoT appliances monitoring NO
_x
, PM (Particle Matter), CO
₂
, O
₃
etc. in various cities in Norway. The city of Porsgrunn with a tradition for process industries is in the county of Telemark belonging to the region called Grenland. The main hospital in Grenland, Telemark Hospital, the municipality of Porsgrunn and the research institute SINTEF/Tel-Tek have an ongoing program for monitoring environmental parameters along with weather data. In view of the fact that the region has a number of process industries and some rare incidents of gas leakages and air pollution levels exceeding limits set by the authorities have been reported, there is a need to alert individuals of environmental conditions. This paper presents a mobile alert system for individuals based on Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NIL U) data from different locations, along with weather parameters from www.yr.no in the form a push service available to any individual who has a user name in the web server developed for this purpose by students and staff of the University of South-Eastern Norway. The basic details of the parameters monitored, the database used and the mobile app are described in this paper. This work is based on a series of problem based learning (PBL) assignments and many bachelor and master projects.