Participatory Air Pollution Monitoring Using Smartphones

Air quality monitoring is extremely important as air pollution has a direct impact on human health. In this paper we introduce a low-power and low-cost mobile sensing system for participatory air quality monitoring. In contrast to traditional stationary air pollution monitoring stations, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of GasMobile, a small and portable measurement system based on off-the-shelf components and suited to be used by a large number of people. Vital to the success of participatory sensing applications is a high data quality. We improve measurement accuracy by (i) exploiting sensor readings near governmental measurement stations to keep sensor calibration up to date and (ii) analyzing the effect of mobility on the accuracy of the sensor readings to give user advice on measurement execution. Finally, we show that it is feasible to use GasMobile to create collective high-resolution air pollution maps.