Materials Today: Proceedings 51 (2022) 1147–1150

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Materials Today: Proceedings

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matpr

Air pollution monitoring system using IoT devices: Review

S.M.S.D. Malleswari, T. Krishna Mohana ⇑
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering, Surampalem, A.P., India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Air pollution became the major problem in the world. The world is getting polluted because of emission
Received 27 May 2021 of dangerous gases into air such as CO2, SO2, NO2, and CO. These toxic gases are dissolved in air and can-
Received in revised form 17 June 2021 not be predicted. Hence a tool is required to check the air quality. The air pollution can be monitor by
Accepted 3 July 2021
using internet based devices like IoT. Internet of thing (IoT) devices can collect the data and based on data
Available online 26 July 2021
can analysis for prediction i.e. quality of air is good or not. Thus, the air quality of a particular area can be
monitored using IOT based devices and sensors using Arduino/Raspberry Pi. The purpose of this research
Keywords:
study is to understand Information on environmental variables and also allowing easy integration into
Air quality
Environmental pollution
any other type of internet-based architecture (IoT) which allows the use of sensors capable of collect
Arduino/Raspberry Pi information on sensors related to smart city environment measurements, with a view to providing data
on which environmental pollution-related information.
Ó 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 1st International Con-
ference on Computations in Materials and Applied Engineering – 2021.

1. Introduction net of Things (IoT).These sensors helps to monitor the dangerous

gases which are dissolved in air and to know the air quality. By using
Pollution is the major problem not only in one country but all sensors we can easily monitor the pollution percentage in the envi-
over the world according to World Health Organisation (WHO). ronment. For example, in a city where it is crowded if attached with
So to prevent the pollution first we have to detect some gases such these sensors detects the information about pollution levels and air
as CO, O3,NO2,etc.These gases causes pollution and are more dan- qualityin that certain area and sends it to cloud ofmonitoringand pre-
gerous to human health which leads to lung cancers, dizziness, dictionofpollutioncanbe solvedby usingIoT devicesand sensors.The
cough, etc .These gases can’t be detected through simple vision. greater occurrences of human heart disorders in society have been
In most of the urban areas this pollution became the major prob- linked with high levels of particulate matter. Fossil fuels burned and
lem which is because of releasing of gases through motor vehicles the atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide is warming the world
as well as by industries. To detect such types of gases scientists [6–9]. The poisonous compounds released into the environment are
have been using some primitive methods i.e., collecting air samples turned into water and plants. Releasing of dangerous chemicals into
in certain areas and analysing those in laboratories. But these air and water by industries leads to pollution of society. This pollution
methods are inefficient and expensive. Then scientists used to causes dangerous diseases to living beings on the earth. Pollution, like
make use of IoT and sensors equipments which are basically the garbage that gets washed up from our streets, animal waste, or
worked out by the technology of IoT [1–5]. plastic bottles in our oceans, kills our ecosystem, giving us dirty
Now-a-days Internet of Things (IoT) plays a imperative role in groundwater or air, like air that’s filled with sulphur, which causes
technology era. Thus IoT which is much involved in human life shows lung and skin cancers. It makes food and drinking water contami-
a enormous path to detect these dangerous gases and to check the air nated and poisonous, causing serious human diseases with cancers.
quality using Sensors. Sensors and IoT devices are made using Inter- The way it also destroys the atmosphere, is by killing the ozone in
the stratosphere. Acid rain is a by product of plants which produces
toxic levels of sulfuric and nitric acids in the soil. Air pollution, like
⇑ Corresponding author at: Assistant Prof., Department of Electronics and Tel Aviv, causes numerous environmental impacts, the majority of
Communication Engineering, Aditya College of Engineering, Surampalem, A.P.,
which are harmful to the human health. (Note this is a paraphrase
India
for GP) Nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide combine to create Nitric
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S.M.S.D. Malleswari), krishnamo-
Oxide and Sulphur Dioxide respectively. This pollution affect also
[email protected] (T.K. Mohana).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2021.07.114
2214-7853/Ó 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 1st International Conference on Computations in Materials and Applied Engineering – 2021.
S.M.S.D. Malleswari and T. Krishna Mohana Materials Today: Proceedings 51 (2022) 1147–1150

leads to depletion of ozone layer due to emission of harmful gases into 3. Literature survey
the environment. Due to pollution the wildlife population is being
reduced in our society since many years. Many wildlife communities In this discussion, an IoT based air pollution monitoring system
were destroyed due to the pollution affect. In our society many people was studied. This system can be used for monitoring air pollutants
are suffering from different dangerous diseases. Lungs growth of in a particular area. The process of analysis and forecasting was
infants is also being reduced due to the inhalation of polluted air. Pol- also being done. This process was done using machine learning
lution mostly leads to asthma and respiratory diseases due to inhala- algorithm called recurrent neural network specifically long short
tion of these toxic gases .These toxic gases damages the immune term memory(LSTM) [1]. In urban areas the air pollution is com-
system and also the reproductive system of humans. This pollution paratively high .The air quality in urban areas degrades because
problem should be reduced in the society in order to protect our- of emission of smoke from vehicles and toxic gases from industries.
selves. Detection of dangerous gases can be done using IoT [10–13]. So, to check the air quality in urban areas the wireless sensor net-
works (WSN) and low cost ambient sensors were used for real time
monitoring [2]. Pollution detection and monitoring is an important
2. Methodology
task in this real world. This paper was proposed to monitor the air
quality using wireless sensors and data mining algorithm. In this
Air quality control over a web server is used by our IoT based air
process the microcontrollers were involved to send the data to
pollution control system to display the results online. A notice will
web servers. Bluetooth module was worked for connecting the ser-
be given if air quality reaches a certain degree of toxicity, and there
ver to the internet [3]. An air quality monitoring system (AQMS) by
will be adequate concentrations of harmful gases, including CO2,
IEEE standards was present. In this process the GSM wireless com-
smoke, alcohol, benzene, NH3, and NO2. The system uses air sen-
munication module was used. The IoT sensor arrays were used for
sors to sense and transfer this data for the microcontroller. The
real time monitoring of dangerous gases like CO2, CO,NO2 and SO2 .
microcontroller then stores the data on the web server. The proces-
The graphical user interface(GUI) was developed to plot the gas
sor processes the data sent by the web server and sends the proces-
values in it [4]. The IoT based environmental monitoring system
sor data to the predictor. Predictor is used to predict the dangerous
for smart cities was enabled to check the air quality, humidity
air particles which are dissolved with the air. So by using these IoT
levels and weather conditions. The data sent from the transmitter
devices and sensors the toxic air particles can be monitored easily
was received at the receiver and then the received data is moni-
as sown in Fig. 1. The solution for this pollution problem is to mon-
tored and recorded using GUI. Also, an android app was developed
itor the air quality using IOT devices and Sensors.
to monitor that data through a smart phone [5]. The system for
In Fig. 2, block diagram shows the method of monitoring the air
monitoring and forecasting of air pollution levels in urban areas
pollution using IoT. In the figure it shows that the polluting air par-
was presented in this paper. The monitoring and forecasting of
ticles can be monitored easily by using sensors. The air sensor pro-
air quality in urban areas was done by using IOT based wireless
duces the output of air samples in that particular area and the
sensor networks. The dissolved toxic gases such as CO,CO2 and
noise sensor acts as a filter and eliminates the noise included with
NO2 were monitored using machine learning algorithm [6]. A low
air particles. The output of air sensor and noise sensor is fed to the
cost wireless air quality monitoring system was developed which
Arduino as the input.
was an IoT application. This system was embedded with electron-
ics and also software sensors enabled for wireless connectivity to
2.1. Arduino allow monitoring air quality in real time. Arduino methodology
was also used to connect the server to the internet directly [7].
Arduino is a open-source electronic platform on which we can In this paper an IoT based air pollution monitoring system was pro-
mount sensors and fetch the sensors data from it. The fetched data posed which can observe the air quality information without the
is send to the raspberry pi device to connect it with the cloud. place or space restriction .In this system the air quality measuring
device and analyzer were used to monitor the pollutants through
LTE communication network and compared it with the results of
2.2. Raspberry PI
National ambient air quality monitoring information system
(NAMIS) [8]. Since the air pollution became the major problem
It is a mini computer that can be plugged into a computer mon-
all over the world, this paper was proposed to monitor the air qual-
itor or TV. It has an on board Wi-Fi with which we can connect
ity in barangay at Pandacan, Manila. A hardware was used to mon-
directly to internet for sending sensor data and for receiving the
itor the air quality through an e-mail in which the hardware
data through local area network (LAN). Thus, the output of LAN
consists of a dust sensor, carbon monoxide sensor and raspberry
is given to the cloud which analyses the given data and enables
pi in order to send the data through this e-mail [9]. The purpose
to check the air quality through an android app.
of this paper was to develop the internet of things (IoT) based air
pollution monitoring systems. Since the pollution was making
the people to be diseased, the IoT sensors and devices were pro-
posed to monitor the air quality in different areas of a smart city.
Thus, by using IoT based sensors we can eradicate the problem of
pollution [10].
The pollution due to vehicles became the major problem in the
society. So, by automobile air pollution monitoring system using
IoT helps in detecting the vehicles which emits the gases greater
than the standard limit. Thus, by observing that we can easily mon-
itor the pollutants and this helps in preventing the pollution levels
which were emitted by vehicles[11]. A three-phase air pollution
surveillance system has launched a campaign to monitor global
air emissions. This kit includes gas sensors, IDE arduino and the
Fig. 1. Block diagram of air pollution monitoring and forecasting system. Wi-Fi module. This IoT package consists of gas sensors. Sensors

1148
S.M.S.D. Malleswari and T. Krishna Mohana Materials Today: Proceedings 51 (2022) 1147–1150

Fig. 2. block diagram of IoT based air pollution monitoring system.

are mounted in a specific region or town and collect air quality borne pollutants and particulate matter. In conjunction with other
information and later reports to a server in real time where air data, this measure enables us to see air quality at a certain location
quality can be tracked in a particular area/city [12]. Environmental on a map.
pollution is an extremely significant issue for public safety and
health. In order to understand the existence of associations CRediT authorship contribution statement
between environment, health and behaviour, measuring the exact
distribution of fine-grain particulates in the air are necessary. With S.M.S.D. Malleswari: Investigation, Writing - original draft. T.
electronic part size and costs decreasing, sensor engineers showed Krishna Mohana: Writing - review & editing.
higher interest. Furthermore, the ability to use advanced micro-
electronics and communication technology accelerated computer Declaration of Competing Interest
miniaturisation. Based on the appearance of these sensors, fine
particulate air emissions may be collected [13]. The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
4. Discussion to influence the work reported in this paper.

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