2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan.
22 – 24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA
IoT Based Smart Wearable for Air Quality
Monitoring
Ravi Kishore Kodali
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Warangal
WARANGAL-506004
ravikkodali@gmail.com
Abstract— Internet of Things has been providential in tackling a
lot of problems that amassed a lot of attention and concern
among people. A lot of consumer electronics today have multiple
IoT subsystems functioning in them, that not only make a
product smart, but also increases its value as a product. Air
pollution is a very serious problem, that has proved its
deleteriousness over the past few years. With a lot of densely
populated cities, now branded as unsafe for people to live in, due
mainly to the polluted air it is home to, the importance for a
solution that alerts city dwellers about the air quality of a space is
gaining momentum. IoT, however could solve this problem, by
educating people about the air quality, after measuring them. A
dedicated air pollution monitoring device will not be effective
enough in making people accept that an air quality monitor is a
necessity and not a luxury. Therefore, this work integrates an air
pollution monitoring system into a wearable like a watch that
also doubles as a fitness tracker and a temperature monitor. Air
pollutant levels, footsteps taken and ambient temperature are all
sensed and displayed by the smart watch proposed in this work
and is also casted to a custom designed smartphone application.
The device proposed is novel in what it can do at the extremely
low cost that it takes for its build. Thus a watch that can do
everything that other watches can and cannot do has been
proposed, with a tight integration to a smartphone app.
I. INTRODUCTION
One of the most important and pressing problems in the
21st century is air pollution. The past decade has seen a steady
increase in air pollution levels in metropolitan cities in India.
One important cause for this, is rapid industrialization and
pollution growth. While air pollution levels are on the rise,
what is increasing at an even faster rate are the casualties
caused due to them. A lot of air pollutants have been studied to
pose deleterious consequences to the human health. While
ventilation systems have CO2 levels as their chief indicator [1],
it is not the only one that is insidious to air. In fact, carbon
monoxide has been studied to be one of the most harmful air
pollutants that can have detrimental effects on living beings.
Carbon dioxide can cause problems such as dizziness, a
completely unacceptable condition for vehicular environments.
While the conspicuous causes in the form of industrialization,
vehicular exhausts, etc. would take effort and time to combat
against, the presence of air quality information would
tantamount to a growth in awareness, which would in turn help
people in taking measures to alleviate long term health risks. A
978-1-7281-4514-3/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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Sasweth C. Rajanarayanan and Lakshmi Boppana
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Warangal
WARANGAL-506004
large section of the society has been disadvantaged and forlorn
because of the absence of awareness in air pollution related
health risks. Therefore, the demand for air quality monitoring
systems has skyrocketed. There is no doubt that these systems
ameliorate health risks by making information available to their
owners, but the scalability of a solution is an important factor
to consider. A modern day human being intends to get all the
information he needs from a hand held device. Air pollutant
level monitoring is not something a phone would be able to do,
at least directly. Nevertheless, the idea of a dedicated device
for air quality monitoring is not something a lot of people
would get sold to. Therefore, the idea of integrating these
monitoring systems into something that people have found
necessary through the years to use, sounds reasonable and
practical. This has led to the inception of Wearable devices and
Wearable IoT in particular. Smart watches, smart bracelets,
smart hearing aids and glasses are all products of Internet of
Things that are in use today. These devices show a lot of
promise in solving a lot of problems that seem very difficult to
approach otherwise. These devices besides serving singular
functions, like checking time etc., are also being used in
activity tracking and human assistance and their popularity as
assistive devices has been ever increasing. These devices are
also being used as means to control other IoT devices. With the
arrival of fitness trackers, health tracking has become
extensively simple. If not the overall health, a lot of medical
parameters can be monitored right at a person’s wrist.
Monitoring data and making them available to the users at the
right time is itself a very high stake, given that the inception of
severities in diseases and their symptoms happen due mainly to
the absence of essential data at the right time. These devices
would therefore emphasize on prevention than supporting cure.
Wearable IoT devices have reached from tracking step count to
tracking heart rates and have become intelligent enough to
understand the outcomes of a tracked value. Wearables have
become important commodities in the healthcare sector,
enabling continuous patient monitoring and parameter tracking
[2] and logging the measured parameters to the cloud for
centralized access. This has not only reduced medical errors,
but has also improved the efficacy of a treatment in patients
[3]. This becomes just another instance where presence of
information improves the quality of life of people. Seemingly
insignificant data collected by these devices might help big in
data analytics in the cloud. These devices are limited to sensing
data and performing a few subtle operations with it. They log
 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22 – 24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA
these sensed values to the cloud and rely on them for results
and responses that mandate computationally intensive
operations to be done on the collected data. This makes them
low power devices, the power consumption being heavily
dependent on the way they communicate the sensed data to the
cloud, besides sensing them. A wearable solution besides
checking the boxes of ergonomics and power consumption
should also focus on achieving accurate results in what it is
capable of forecasting and sensing. This is what something all
the smart wearables have been trying to achieve besides
supporting new features. Connectivity is another important
factor. A smart wearable connected to a smartphone or the
cloud, should be able to provide data as and when it is available
without any latencies, if there is no problem from the
network’s side. This would mean that a smartphone or cloud
dependent smart wearable should not have frequent “dropouts”.
As far as smartphone-smart wearable communication is
concerned, devices built around the Bluetooth 4.0 or later,
typically boast reliable and stable connectivity over extended
periods of time. Use of Bluetooth Low Energy has improved
the life time of smart wearables, without compromising on data
exchange [4]. This work singularly takes each of these stakes
of being of purpose-oriented smart wearable, into account. This
work discusses the implementation of an IoT based smart
watch that is feature-ridden and ergonomically compact. This
fact is primarily due to the use of a novel hardware
development board called M5Stick-C. With an ergonomic that
aims at wearable device development, this device comes with
an embedded accelerometer, gyroscope and temperature sensor
that can be programmed to sense values that they are capable
of sensing. The smart wearable therefore is a watch that tracks
the step count of its user like conventional fitness trackers and
also measures carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide
concentrations in the surrounding air. These values, along with
the ambient temperature value are sent to the BLYNK
application running on the users’ smartphone, which presents
the received data in a visually aesthetic manner. Moreover,
wearable air quality monitoring systems have all the necessary
technologies for monitoring air pollutant levels, in an already
popular and existent commodity like a watch and are based on
the idea of measure on-the-go, which helps in keeping track of
air quality wherever a person goes, thereby eliminating the
need for a dedicated device for air quality monitoring. This
paper is divided into the following sections: Section II talks
about the related work going on in this field. Section III talks
about the parameters measured in this work. Section IV is all
about the Experimental Setup that this work uses. Section V is
about the Working and Section VI discusses the Results
obtained and Conclusions drawn. Section VII talks about the
Further Scope of this work.
II. RELATED WORK
There has been a lot of work going on in the field of air
quality monitoring systems. There has been a lot of proposals
that cater to different types of use cases. There are bulky and
therefore stationary air quality monitoring systems that are
based on the concept of Internet of Things. They connect to
smartphones and in some cases use the smartphone as a
gateway device to talk to the cloud. There are portable devices
with displays that monitor air pollutant levels and send them to
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cloud [5]. The language has therefore remained the same, to
monitor air pollutant levels and log them to a cloud platform.
The focus therefore has shifted to improving the scalability of
the implementation and the ergonomics of the proposed device.
The idea of air pollutant level monitoring should itself be a
feature that day to day commodities support. These
commodities would therefore help in imparting the much
needed knowledge about air quality besides serving their
respective purposes. Wearable technologies should therefore be
embraced to offer dynamic solutions to important problems
like air pollution.
III. MEASURED PARAMETERS
The device that this work talks the implementation of,
measures carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide concentrations
and also tracks the number of steps taken by the user. The work
uses the following algorithm to realize a pedometer in the
device:
A. Algorithm for Pedometer
1) The M5Stick-C is the hardware development board
used in this work. This board has a SH200Q 6-axis
IMU sensor, which can measure 3-axis accelerometer
values and 3-axis gyroscope values. This sensor thus
records the x, y and z components of acceleration of
the user.
2) A threshold acceleration value is maintained at 80
units.
3) The x, y and z components of the acceleration are
read and their magnitude is calculated to get the total
acceleration for each set of readings.
4) The average of the current and previous total
acceleration is calculated and compared with the
threshold.
5) If the average is greater than the threshold, the step
count is incremented, else it is left as it is.
6) This step count is also displayed on the LCD display
of the M5Stack.
B. Carbon Monoxide
Carbon monoxide is one of the chief and deleterious air
pollutants. Carbon monoxide is emitted from anything that
makes use of combustion fumes. Therefore, heating systems,
vehicles, gasoline engines, burning of wood and charcoal etc.
emit carbon monoxide when they are functional. Carbon
monoxide gas has the property of binding itself to
haemoglobin in red blood cells thereby potentially reducing
the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. Symptoms of
carbon monoxide poisoning include nausea, dizziness,
headache and chest pain. The fact that the gas is odourless and
colourless makes it difficult for easy detection. Thus causes
for health problems related to carbon monoxide may look just
as abstract as the presence of the gas itself in the air.
Therefore, a real time carbon monoxide monitoring system is
of very high importance [6].
 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22 – 24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA
C. Carbon Monoxide
Carbon dioxide is also one of the important and harmful air
pollutants that has both short term and long term effects. As
carbon dioxide levels inside a closed room increases,
breathing becomes hard. One short term effect that the gas has
is headaches, which can get severe at increased carbon dioxide
levels [7]. High levels of carbon dioxide, generally in indoor
spaces would essentially imply that other air pollutants like
volatile organic compounds are also extant at high levels in a
given space. This is a concern; as volatile organic compounds
are themselves potential air pollutants. Carbon dioxide is also
a potential greenhouse gas and therefore contribute to the
greenhouse effect. A long term effect of carbon dioxide is
climate change [7]. From burning of fuels to certain types of
fertilizers, carbon dioxide concentrations have various
manmade causes.
Measurement of both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide is
therefore, of prime importance.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
A. M5Stick-C
The M5Stick-C is an ESP-32 based hardware development
board. Introduced in 2019, the board is new and has been
receiving a lot of attention lately, owing to its use in Wearable
applications. Its form factor, along with a 0.92-inch LCD
screen, its GPIO pins and it having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and
Bluetooth Low Energy capabilities make it a perfect hardware
development board for Wearable-IoT applications. The board
comes at a very low cost and is highly developer friendly.
Being an ESP-32 based board, it has all the features that the
ESP-32 supports like Wi-Fi, Classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth
Low Energy. The ESP-32 has an on-board cryptographic
hardware accelerator block that adds security to IoT data
transactions. The M5Stick-C has an on board SH200Q 6-axis
IMU sensor that is capable of measuring 3-axis accelerometer
data and 3-axis gyroscope data. The accelerometer data has
been used to track step count. The M5Stick-C has 3 hardware
buttons. The device can also be used for infrared applications,
owing to the presence of an on-board infrared sensor. The
board supports a lot of development options. The Stick-C
comes pre-flashed with its custom UI-Flow firmware. It can
also be programmed using Micropython, C and C++.
Fig. 1. The M5Stick-C
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The Arduino IDE provides support for programming the
M5Stick-C. Fig 2 shows the M5Stick-C. The M5Stick-C has
been interfaced with the MQ-7 gas sensor for measuring
carbon monoxide concentrations and the MQ 135 sensor for
measuring carbon dioxide concentrations. The MQ-7 and MQ-
135 sensors have similar form factors to the M5Stick-C. The
setup thus does not look extravagant in appearance. The
M5Stick-C interfaced with the MQ-7 and MQ-135 sensors
acts as the network edge device in this work. The edge device
is therefore an ergonomically compact device that stays true to
its use in Wearable-IoT devices. The M5Stick-C displays all
the data that it measures on its 0.92- inch LCD screen.
B. The BLYNK Application
The BLYNK platform is a hardware-agnostic Internet of
Things platform that offers greatly customizable mobile
applications, private cloud services, data analytics, device
management and machine learning. The platform makes it
simple for connecting devices to the cloud and allows the
development of custom applications targeted at smartphone
use, to control them [8]. Applications developed on the
BLYNK app can analyse telemetry data at multiple levels and
gives a good hold over the data obtained. The data collected
can be represented in an aesthetic manner that would be
helpful in readily and effortlessly conveying the data that we
want it to convey. The app also gives the provision for
deploying the application created, the created application
being compatible with both Android OS and iOS mobile
operating systems. This platform has been used in this work to
host the pedometer data, the temperature, carbon monoxide
and carbon dioxide concentrations. The app thus aims at
providing the user with device management options, by
mirroring all that the M5Stick- C displays on its LCD screen.
The firmware that goes into the M5Stick-C has been written in
C++.
V. WORKING
The M5Stick-C has been interfaced with the MQ-7 sensor and
the MQ-135 sensor for measuring carbon monoxide and
carbon dioxide concentrations respectively. The air is sensed
for the pollutant concentrations every 10 seconds and the
sensed values are displayed on the M5Stick-C’s LCD screen.
The embedded temperature sensor has been used to measure
the temperature, which is displayed on the LCD screen too.
The embedded accelerometer has been used to implement a
pedometer for tracking the step count, which is displayed on
the LCD screen. The device is named as AirFit owing to its
ability to track footsteps that promote fitness and air pollutant
levels that promote awareness to a person regarding the real
time air quality. 8500 steps per day is a globally accepted step
count that is necessary to keep a person healthy. The device is
 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22 – 24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

essentially a watch, that doubles as a footsteps and air concentrations can be measured wherever the user goes.
pollutant level tracker. Fig 2 shows what the AirFit looks like. Logging measured data to the app is subject to availability of
internet connection.

VI. RESULTS

The AirFit device, a watch that doubles as a fitness tracker and

Fig. 2. The AirFit Device developed in this work.
air quality monitoring device, was able to measure carbon
monoxide and carbon dioxide concentrations, track footsteps
and measure temperature. These parameters were then logged
to the AirFit application created using the Blynk application.
The AirFit application running on the Blynk platform, hosting
the parameters received from the AirFit device is shown in Fig
4.

The M5Stick-C has been programmed to log the sensed values

to a smartphone app created using the BLYNK application,
called AirFit and solicits internet connectivity to do so. The
reason for choosing a Wi-Fi based data communication to a
smartphone is that the device can also be used as a stationary
air pollutant level tracker in an indoor space if needed and can
effectively perform remote sensing and efficient data
communication to the smartphone, of the measured pollutant
values. The app provides a graphical view of the sensor data,
by using gauges for displaying the pollutants’ data and value
displays for displaying step count and temperature values.
These data fields are programmed to be accessed by the
M5Stick-C using virtual pins. Each measured parameter is
sent to a virtual pin, which routes the received value to a data
field. The app thus features a dashboard that assists in device
management. Every data that the M5Stick-C’s LCD screen
displays is mirrored by the AirFit app. The BLYNK app issues
a token which the M5Stick-C has been programmed to use
while sending data to the app. The data sensed is updated on
the app in real time, with very low to zero latency.
Fig. 4. Parameters from the device being logged into the
Blynk App.

Air quality monitors have conventionally been devices entirely

Fig. 3. The AirFit Device integrated with the AirFit Blynk
App.
Device management can thus be done using the AirFit app.
Using the AirFit watch and the AirFit app, air pollutant
dedicated to perform their prime function, which is continuous
air quality monitoring. These devices have been miniaturized
in the past, yet have been restricted to singularly doing their
routine alone of air quality monitoring. The device discussed
in this work supersedes conventional air quality monitors, as
user investment therefore need no more go into a dedicated
device that monitors air quality alone, but on an already extant
device that dually functions as a watch and an IoT device that
tracks fitness and monitors air pollution. These features
therefore exalt the AirFit smart wearable device to a bang for
the buck product. The device also casts all the data that it
measures to the AirFit smartphone app for having a holistic
view of all that the AirFit device measures. The build has been
one that involves less cost, with the M5Stick-C priced at 10
US dollars. The proposed device thus checks the right boxes in
ensuring environmental safety and educating users about their
fitness, besides air pollution monitoring.

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2020), Jan. 22 – 24, 2020, Coimbatore, INDIA

VII. FURTHER SCOPE

In this work air quality parameters such as carbon dioxide and

carbon monoxide have been measured. This work can be
extended to measure other important parameters such as PM
2.5 and PM 10, prolonged exposure to which can cause lung
cancer in human beings. This would thus help in
understanding air quality better and the proposed wearable
device would be much more capable in assessing air quality
that what it currently is. Machine learning algorithms can be
used to analyse a user’s health based on the readings that the
Blynk app receives, to advice users about the health risks that
they are capable of being subjected to. A device that thus
dedicates itself to complete health tracking can be achieved.

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