Low Cost Sensor With IoT LoRaWAN Connectivity and Machine Learning-Based Calibration for Air Pollution Monitoring

Air pollution poses significant risk to environment and health. Air quality monitoring stations are often confined to a small number of locations due to the high cost of the monitoring equipment. They provide a low fidelity picture of the air quality in the city; local variations are overlooked. However, recent developments in low-cost sensor technology and wireless communication systems like Internet of Things (IoT) provide an opportunity to use arrayed sensor networks to measure air pollution, in real time, at a large number of locations. This article reports the development of a novel low-cost sensor node that utilizes cost-effective electrochemical sensors to measure carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations and an infrared sensor to measure particulate matter (PM) levels. The node can be powered by either solar-recharged battery or mains supply. It is capable of long-range, low power communication over public or private long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) IoT network and short-range high data rate communication over Wi-Fi. The developed sensor nodes were co-located with an accurate reference CO sensor for field calibration. The low-cost sensors' data, with offset and gain calibration, show good correlation with the data collected from the reference sensor. Multiple linear regression (MLR)-based temperature and humidity correction results in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 48.71% and R-2 of 0.607 relative to the reference sensor's data. Artificial neural network (ANN)-based calibration shows the potential for significant further improvement with MAPE of 38.89% and R-2 of 0.78 for leave-one-out cross-validation.

Automated summary

This article introduces a novel sensor node that uses low-cost sensor technology and IoT systems to measure air pollution concentrations in real-time at multiple locations. The sensor node can be calibrated with a reference sensor on-site, showing good correlation and high calibration accuracy.