Characterising low-cost sensors in highly portable platforms to quantify personal exposure in diverse environments

Abstract

The inaccurate quantification of personal exposure to air pollution introduces error and bias in health estimations, severely limiting causal inference in epidemiological research worldwide. Rapid advancements in affordable, miniaturised air pollution sensor technologies offer the potential to address this limitation by capturing the high variability of personal exposure during daily life in largescale studies with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. However, concerns remain regarding the suitability of novel sensing technologies for scientific and policy purposes. In this paper we characterise the performance of a portable personal air quality monitor (PAM) that integrates multiple miniaturised sensors for nitrogen oxides (NO x ), carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O 3 ) and particulate matter (PM) measurements along with temperature, relative humidity, acceleration, noise and GPS sensors. Overall, the air pollution sensors showed high reproducibility (mean R 2 = 0.93, min-max: 0.80-1.00) and excellent agreement with standard instrumentation (mean R 2 = 0.82, min-max: 0.54-0.99) in outdoor, indoor and commuting microenvironments across seasons and different geographical settings. An important outcome of this study is that the error of the PAM is significantly smaller than the error introduced when estimating personal exposure based on sparsely distributed outdoor fixed monitoring stations. Hence, novel sensing technologies such as the ones demonstrated here can revolutionise health studies by providing highly resolved reliable exposure metrics at a large scale to investigate the underlying mechanisms of the effects of air pollution on health.

Real‐time measurements of PM2.5and ozone to assess the effectiveness of residential indoor air filtration in Shanghai homes

“…In addition, both the performance of the individual Plantower 49‐55 and specifically the Plantower PMS3003 56‐60 have been widely studied. In previous work, researchers have deployed Alphasense O 3 sensors 61‐66 and have used them to measure indoor concentrations 67‐69 . It is important to calibrate air sensors, especially optical‐based PM 2.5 measurements, in the deployment location 43,70 .…”

Evaluation of optical particulate matter sensors under realistic conditions of strong and mild urban pollution

“…Due to all the above-mentioned factors, it is always interesting to check how OPS perform in different realistic scenarios. Numerous papers deal with laboratory calibrations and outdoor evaluations of OPS (Karagulian et al, 2019;Borghi et al, 2018;Chatzidiakou et al, 2019;Magi et al, 2020;Sousan et al, 2016b;Malings et al, 2020;Kelly et al, 2017;Sayahi et al, 2019;Crilley et al, 2018;Zheng et al, 2018;Tasic et al, 2012;Cavaliere et al, 2018;Mukherjee et al, 2017;Sousan et al, 2016a;Zhang et al, 2018;Holstius et al, 2014;Badura et al, 2018). Reported results vary depending on the composition of particulate matter pollution, range of concentrations and meteorological factors.…”

Improved aerosol correction for OMI tropospheric NO<sub>2</sub> retrieval over East Asia: constraint from CALIOP aerosol vertical profile

“… Data availability. Research data supporting this paper are available at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.41918 (Chatzidiakou et al, 2019). …”