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Monitoring Indoor Air Quality by using IoT Technology

Conference Paper · August 2018

DOI: 10.1109/INTERCON.2018.8526380

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 Monitoring Indoor Air Quality by using IoT
Technology
J. Esquiagola, M. Manini, A. Aikawa, L.Yoshioka and M. Zuffo
Omni Electronica Inc, Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo University, Electronic Systems Department
Email: {john,matheus,arthur,leopoldo,mkzuffo}@usp.br
Abstract—Millions of people worldwide die prematurely as
a consequence of air pollution. Many of these deaths occur
in large cities, where exhaust from cars, factories, and power
plants fills the air with hazardous particles. Indoor air pollution
can be higher than outdoor concentrations up to ten times
due to incorrect functionality of heating, ventilation, and air
conditioning (HVAC) system. Internet of Things can help to
perform a real time monitoring of indoor air quality by using
embedded electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity. One
approach that is gaining momentum is the Web of Things, that
uses web architecture and web standards as a framework for
creating IoT applications. In this paper, an IoT platform for
monitoring indoor air quality is presented. The implementation
is based on the Web of Things concept and uses CoAP protocol
to collect data from sensors. Hardware platform developed for
this project is also presented and implementation details are
described.
Keywords-Air Quality, Internet of Things, CoAP.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a new technology
in which devices and/or machines interact with each other
in order to build a new global network [1]. It is expected
to change many aspects of human life such as education,
communication, business, and science. IoT can be seen as
the next evolution of the Internet, where huge amounts of
data can be collected and analyzed to generate important
and useful information [2]. With the adoption of the IoT
technology, things are able to see, hear, think and execute
tasks based on some decision taken by themselves [3]. Air
pollution monitoring is considered as a very complex task
but it is very important. Traditionally data loggers were
used to collect data periodically and this was very time
consuming and quite expensive. The control and monitoring
of indoor air conditions represents an important task with
the aim of ensuring suitable working and living spaces to
people. However, the comprehensive air quality monitoring
which include monitoring of temperature, humidity, air
quality, etc., is not so easy to be monitored and controlled.
Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) can be affected by several agents
or parameters like temperature, humidity, volatile organic
compounds (VOC), particulate matter (PM), aerosols, etc.
This work was supported by grant 2015/22209-4 and 2016/15514-8 from
Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
978-1-5386-5491-0/18/$31.00
2018
c IEEE
There are many reports that demonstrate insufficient IAQ
levels can generate health problems to building occupants
[4] [5]. Web of things defines standards and protocols to
be used in IoT applications[6]. Based on this concept, IoT
applications can be wrapped into RESTful web services.
It reduces the complexity of applications and to improve
software re-usability [7]. They use a uniform interface, taking
advantage of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) commands
and applying them to resources (things pointed by URIs)
using the REST architectural style. CoAP (Constrained
Application Protocol)[8] is a standard application protocol,
designed to implement RESTFul in constrained devices [9].
Then, CoAP can be considered the ideal protocol for M2M
and IoT applications where resources are limited.
In this paper, we present our IoT solution for monitoring
indoor environments. We focus on the main parameters that
determine the indoor air quality inside buildings like offices,
hospitals, homes, schools, etc. This work is an evolution of
a previous work which has presented the initial stage of the
platform and another methodology [10]. We have developed
our custom hardware, firmware and software regarding to
present a complete solution from specification until visualiza-
tion of results. Our solution uses the CoAP protocol to perform
the communication between devices and follow the Web of
things paradigm. The remainder of this paper is organized
as follows: Section II presents the related work about IoT
solutions for air quality monitoring. Section III highlights the
architecture overview of our IoT platform. Section IV details
a case of study of the solution and initial results and analysis
are presented in Section V. Section VI concludes the paper
with final considerations and future work.
II. R ELATED W ORK
In the IoT field, there are lots of applications being de-
veloped by the academic and industry communities. IoT are
considered Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with specific
Internet interface to deploy the information in the cloud. It
is an active field of research due to its emerging importance
in many applications including environment and habitat mon-
itoring, health care applications, traffic control and military
network systems. A sensor network for indoor air quality
monitoring which consists of a base station connected to
the internet and several nodes sensors regarding to measure
temperature, humidity, light and air quality is presented in
[11]. The standard IEEE 802.15.4 (Zig-Bee protocol) using
the XBee module was utilized to perform the communication
between the nodes and the host. A proposed wireless sensor
network (WSN) for monitoring the carbon monoxide levels of
an indoor environment is presented in [12]. Temperature and
humidity of the air are also acquired in the real-time. Sensor
nodes collect the data and update a web database which can
be monitored though a website. It uses the Zigbee protocol
based on the Waspmote board. The system can send alarms in
case of an emergency by using a GSM/GPRS module. There
are other solutions related air quality but they are focused
on urban pollution where pollutants are different from the
indoor pollutants [13] [14] [15]. IoT solutions that cover
Indoor Air Quality use Arduino-based hardware and they only
collect temperature, humidity, light and more one parameter
like carbon monoxide. Our solution gather specific indoor air
quality parameters like TVOC and particulate material and
uses Web of Things approach.
Fig. 1: IoT System Architecture
III. I OT S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE
The proposed Indoor Air Quality monitoring system was
designed and developed to obtain a fine-grain record of in-
door environment conditions. The parameters monitored were
chosen, so that the following conditions could be studied:
hygrothermal comfort, IAP and system operation optimization.
The system architecture of the platform is shown in Figure 1.
The system is composed of sensor nodes, a border router and
a gateway that collect data acquired by each sensor node.
Gateway performs CoAP requests through the border router
which communicates with the sensor nodes. Data collected is
inserted to the MariaDB database which can be stored locally
or sent to a remote server (cloud system). 6LowPAN protocol
is the base of the communication between all individuals of
the network. The 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless
Personal Area Networks) standard makes use of techniques
and rules for reducing headers and packets while making the
translation to common protocols, such as IP. It enables the use
of the integrated 802.15.4 standard for IP addressing.
A. Hardware
According to the architecture, there are three main hardware
modules: Gateway, border router and sensor nodes. The Gate-
way performs the requests to collect data from sensors. It also
stores all data in a local database and can execute some pre-
processing tasks. Raspberry Pi 3 was selected as a gateway
because it provides reasonable functionalities to execute the
gateway tasks and it offers a great scalability factor. The whole
system can be booted from a Micro SD card, which can be
separately reproduced. It is also very compact and easy to
configure and maintain. Raspbian linux was installed and used
as a operating system of the platform. The second component
is the border router which establishes the communication
between the gateway and the sensor nodes. It can be con-
sidered an interface between the IPv6 and IPv4 networks. In
our platform, the Launchpad CC2650 kit performs the border
router functionality and uses the RPL protocol to create the
IPv6 network. The communication between the gateway and
border router is done through an UART interface. The sensor
nodes are designed to incorporate until ten sensors but in
this initial version only six parameters are used: Temperature,
Humidity, Pressure, Particulate Material, TVOC and eCO2.
Each sensor node have an RF communication interface to send
out the acquired data. Thus, the node hardware utilizes a Texas
Instruments CC2650MODA which performs the communica-
tion between the node and the gateway.
Fig. 2: IAQ Sensor Node
The final hardware is shown in the figure 2. The design,
specification and validation of the hardware was completely
developed by the authors. The PCB (Printed Circuit Board)
is 7.7 x 6.3 cm and it can be considered small for a hardware
with ten sensors.
B. Firmware
The sensor nodes were programmed with the latest version
of the Contiki Operating System [16]. It provides performance,
stability and good documentation. Contiki advantages are
the availability of timers, networking and many other tools
developed by the Contiki community. All sensor devices use
the I2C protocol, then specific Texas Instruments libraries
are used to implement the sensor drivers. CoAP protocol was
used to establish the communication between the devices
and the gateway. It uses a client-server communication based
on requests like HTTP protocol. Then, there are GET, PUT,
POST and DELETE commands to request data from the
sensors. Contiki community provides some examples to
implement CoAP requests based on Erbium REST server. A
mini Coap server was implemented for each sensor available
in our hardware. It allows to expose the sensor like a web
resource. Each sensor node is configured with an IPV6
address and offers its resources like the following example:
coap://IPV6-ADDR:5683/sensors/temp
coap://IPV6-ADDR:5683/sensors/hum
coap://IPV6-ADDR:5683/sensors/pm10
Figure 3 shows a typical CoAP transaction used in our
solution. There are a URL that uses IPV6 address to identify
our node sensor and the URI path ( sensors/temp ) allows to
access the resource available.
Fig. 3: CoAP GET Temperature Request
In the case of border router, a specific tunneling code is
used to establish the communication between the gateway and
the sensor nodes. Contiki provides a program called tunslip6,
which bridges the border router to the host via a tun interface
(tun0). Figure 4 shows the routes being identified by the border
router after a GET request. Two sensor nodes are presented in
the IPV6 network: ...3a3a:51 and ...3a3a:52.
Fig. 4: Border Router IP Routes
C. Software
The gateway is a main component of the system which
needs to perform requests, receive and pre-process data, store
in a local database and finally to send to the cloud. It runs un-
der Linux raspbian, then it needs to execute specific programs
to perform all activities. Python scripts are used to implement
these tasks and MariaDb database is used to store the data
locally. The border router activation and the collecting script
was implemented by specific daemons that runs at the system
boot. Besides there are two cron jobs running each 5 minutes
to guarantee the data is always being collected. Figure 5
shows the log file with the sensors data information. Fields
are defined like: datetime, address, temperature, humidity,
pressure. eco2, tvoc, pm10, pm25 and pm100.
Fig. 5: Sensors data
To visualize the data a Ubidots plataform is used
(www.ubidots.com). This platforms offers a framework to
capture, process and visualize data in real time. It provides an
API which allows devices to be connected with the platform.
Several protocols are supported: MQTT/HTTP/TCP/UDP. In
our specific case, a python script utilizes the HTTP API to
send the data from the gateway to the Ubidots platform.
IV. C ASE OF S TUDY
The object of the experimentation is a work office inside a
building called CIETEC located in So Paulo University. It
is a multi-disciplinary center where many people work in
academic and industrial projects. From five to eight people
daily works in this environment which has approximately
15m2 . Three sensor nodes, a border router and a gateway were
deployed in the office. The sensors collect information each
30 seconds, stored locally in the local database and send to the
cloud for visualizing in the Ubidots platform. Each sensor was
programmed with a specific IPv6 address to be identified in
the 6LowPAN network. A Ubidots dashboard was configured
to received the data and to visualize the eight parameters
being collected. Figure 6 shows the dashboard of the Ubidots
platform.
V. R ESULTS
Figure 6 only shows the data for one day, so the first analysis
to be performed are related to particulate material and tvoc.
An increase of the Tvoc and Eco2 occurs at 12pm, it is the
time when people go and back from lunch time. Humans are
natural generator of VOC so probably this increasing quantity
is revealing the presence of many people at the same time in
the office. Particulate material levels are correct for a typical
 Fig. 6: Dashboard of Indoor Air Quality
office, so in this case it reflects the movement of the persons
inside the office because when we move stuff or something
else we just move the dust to the air. If we detect some weird
increase maybe we can say some pollutant has entered in the
office from external source.
VI. C ONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This work presents the implementation of an Iot platform for
monitoring indoor air quality. We have developed our custom
sensor hardware, firmware and software to collect the sensors
information and to send to the dashboard for visualization.
Advanced sensor technologies were used to obtain accurate
results of the parameters which affects the indoor air quality.
We have deployed our system in an office and preliminary
results give us valuable information about air quality behavior
during the day. For our future research, we plan to continue
the real time monitoring and try to emulate real situations in
an indoor environment like cooking, smoking and painting and
analyze the results. Other future research is the implementation
of some techniques to improve the IAQ and to clean the air
inside the indoor environments.
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