In the last blog post about indoor air quality monitoring we discussed the importance and need of monitoring indoor environments for indoor air pollutants and even went into details about what are the most commonly occurring indoor air pollutants. This post will shed light on how we can use IoT to solve the problem of monitoring indoor air quality in real time. The global indoor air quality monitoring market is expected to grow from USD 2.5 billion in 2015 to USD 4.6 billion by 2022[1]. There are many solutions available in the market today from vendors like Honeywell and lesser known startups around this problem.
You might be wondering, “What is the business value of monitoring indoor air quality?” A wide number of healthcare reports suggest that indoor air quality has a significant impact on productivity, health and overall sense of wellbeing. IAQ sensors work by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and odors. By measuring the total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) and applying it to a rating scale, these sensors provide the data needed by connected systems to track, analyze, and potentially clean air in the ambient environment.
The sensor chips are typically just a few millimeters in width, and can easily fit within the existing electronics of exhaust fans, air filtration systems, and HVAC (Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems. They can also be installed externally in indoor environments. The figure below describes a basic network topology of a typical indoor air quality monitoring (IAQM) solution. The architecture can become more complicated in other different environments and use various other IoT wireless network protocols such as Zigbee, thread, LoRaWAN, etc.
References
- Volatile Organic Compound
- Indoor Air Quality Monitoring: How To Test, Measure & Improve
- AN IOT PLATFORM FOR INDOOR AIR QUALITY MONITORING USING THE WEB OF THINGS DANIEL IBASETA1 , JULIO MOLLEDA2 , FIDEL DÍEZ1 & JUAN C. GRANDA2 1 CTIC Technological Centre, Spain 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Oviedo, Spain.
Further study
- Development of an IoT-Based Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Platform
- Indoor Pollutants and Sources: Basic Information on Pollutants and Sources of Indoor Air Pollution
Author
Suman Satish
Applied Singularity 