No abstract

The recent emergence of low-cost sensor technologies, measuring various air pollutants, enables the real-time collection of air pollution data, with high spatio-temporal resolution. In our recent study, we developed and deployed low-cost air quality monitoring sensors and distributed them to citizens of Thessaloniki, Greece. The aim of this study was to provide near real-time air pollution measurements that will allow the better representation of the air pollution levels in the greater area of Thessaloniki. In the current work, we present the low-cost adjustable wireless sensor platform that has been developed for air pollution monitoring in urban areas. The platform can take sensor measurements down to one sample per second and is suitable for Big Data analysis applications such as air quality forecasts, weather forecasts and traffic prediction. The paper aims to contribute to the area of low-cost, distributed sensor networks for Environmental Intelligence applications.

The latest advancements in computer vision have enabled the development of new applications in numerous scientific and technological fields. The program "e-Vision" builds on these advancements with the aim to improve the autonomy of people with visual impairment by means of visual recognition and audio feedback. This is achieved by a set of sensors, properly embedded to a pair of glasses for capturing visual information and for transmitting auditory feedback messages. Appropriate software running on a mobile device (smartphone) is responsible for transmitting and receiving the audio and visual information to and from the sensors. This paper presents a comparative study of relevant wireless communication protocols that could be implemented for the communication of the sensors with the smart mobile device. The application demands certain criteria to be met, regarding data transmission rates, transmission range, and power consumption. The current study focuses on the comparison of the numerous existing wireless communication protocols. It is shown that Bluetooth and WiFi are the most advantageous in order to implement the audio and visual data transmission respectively.