Investigating the use of commodity dust sensors for the embedded measurement of particulate matter

Abstract

Abstract-A variety of studies in the past decades have shown that fine particulate matter can be a serious health hazard, contributing to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Due to this, more and more regulations defining certain permissible concentration limits have been set by governments around the world. However, current standard measurement equipment is large, expensive and sparsely deployed. Additionally, both the exposure to hazardous conditions and the susceptibility to negative health effects vary from person to person. As a result, we see the need for fine-grained, mobile and distributed measurements, e.g. to identify hot spots or monitor people at risk. Our research investigates the feasibility of particulate matter measurements using cheap, commodity dust sensors which are small enough to be incorporated into mobile devices. This paper first discusses application scenarios which would benefit from inexpensive methods to assess the particulate matter load. Subsequently, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors are compared and their general suitability for the application scenarios is examined. Finally, an experimental setup for the evaluation of one of the sensors is presented along with preliminary results.

Enabling low-cost particulate matter measurement for participatory sensing scenarios

“…Several small sensors are compared in [8], the results indicating that only few of those sensors actually seem suitable for the use in mobile PM measurement scenarios. We chose the Sharp GP2Y1010 , a cheap commodity dust sensor, as basis for our work, as it has been used in several dust sensing projects [2,3,11,13,17,23,30].…”

“…We started developing our renements by investigating the performance of the Sharp GP2Y1010 and its ability to measure the particulate matter concentration in the air using the setup described in [8]. All sensors were used as they were delivered, using their unmodied factory sensitivity settings.…”

Low-cost optical manipulation using hanging droplets of PDMS

“…This seems perfectly plausible, with the growing interest in 3d printing of lab equipment, with particular reference to the developing world, as indicated in the recent PLoS Biology paper by Baden et al 20 We also suggest that the device, once developed into a compact form would open up eld studies of aerosols, part of the development of compact, mobile, urban sensors for airborne aerosols. 21 Our initial development appears to have a number of future developmental options.…”

Comparative Experimental Evaluation of Dust Sensors for Environmental Monitoring on Construction Sites

“…measurement chamber), across which air is free to flow and dust concentration is measured by means of the light scattering principle (Fig. 4 Technically, the Sharp dust sensor's measurement chamber causes a pulse whose voltage is proportional to the number of particles which caused the light beam to be diffracted (V s,i ) [8]. The microprocessor works out the mean (V s ) based on the last 16 records.…”