An Embedded Crowdsensing Unit for Mobile Urban Pollution Monitoring

Crowdsensing using mobile sensors to gather environmental data is gaining momentum, given its potential to better reflect the status of larger areas than static stations. Crowdsensing using personal or vehicle devices can offer a flexible solution in smart city scenarios. Apart from regular bikes and mopeds, mobility devices such as e-scooters are sustainable and eco-friendly mobility solutions in urban settings, while at the same time they can offer a flexible mobile crowdsensing platform for environmental perception. However, new hardware designs for onboard units are necessary to cover dimension and power constraints at the same time that proper communications and air pollution sensors are integrated. The unit presented here covers these requirements with a hardware/software platform provided with low-power wide area network (LPWAN) communications, sensors for particulate matter (PM
x
), NO
x
, CO
x
, 0
3
, noise, and weather, and software-based management of peripherals and sensors to reduce power consumption. It involves a fully functional design that has been implemented, together with a proper LPWAN network deployment and a data collection back-end, and has been evaluated on e-scooters in terms of both communications capabilities and functionality for monitoring air and noise pollution in the city of Cartagena, Spain.