Demo: Handheld Particulate Matter Measurements with COTS Sensors

Current mobile phone models are equipped with a variety of sensors and ever increasing processing power. The internal sensors have been employed for various applications, ranging from classical geo-location systems over activity recognition using the native 3D accelerometer to augmented reality. However, there are application areas which require sensors that today can not yet be found in mobile phones, e.g. due to cost or size restrictions. This is especially true for scenarios involving air quality information such as the concentration of potentially harmful gases – like carbon monoxide (CO), dioxide (CO2) or ozone (O3) – or the level of particulate matter (PM). The importance of such applications grows with society’s concern about how these pollutants affect a person’s health or the environment. In the past decades, an increasing number of studies investigated the effects of particulate matter on people’s health. The results are that fine dust can be a serious hazard, contributing to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. This is why regulations aiming at the reduction of man-made particulate matter have been increasingly set by authorities around the world. This demonstration shows the TECO Envboard, an environmental sensing platform for research and development purposes that carries a wide range of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors, many of which are today not yet built into mobile phones. The Envboard is currently used to investigate the feasibility of particulate matter measurements using a cheap, commodity dust sensor: the Sharp GP2Y1010.