Miniaturized Monitors for Assessment of Exposure to Air Pollutants: A Review

Abstract

Air quality has a huge impact on different aspects of life quality, and for this reason, air quality monitoring is required by national and international regulations. Technical and procedural limitations of traditional fixed-site stations for monitoring or sampling of air pollutants are also well-known. Recently, a different type of miniaturized monitors has been developed. These monitors, due to their characteristics (e.g., low cost, small size, high portability) are becoming increasingly important for individual exposure assessment, especially since this kind of instrument can provide measurements at high spatial and temporal resolution, which is a notable advantage when approaching assessment of exposure to environmental contaminants. The aim of this study is indeed to provide information regarding current knowledge regarding the use of miniaturized air pollutant sensors. A systematic review was performed to identify original articles: a literature search was carried out using an appropriate query for the search of papers across three different databases, and the papers were selected using inclusion/exclusion criteria. The reviewed articles showed that miniaturized sensors are particularly versatile and could be applied in studies with different experimental designs, helping to provide a significant enhancement to exposure assessment, even though studies regarding their performance are still sparse.

Evaluation of a 10 nm Particle Number Portable Emissions Measurement System (PEMS)

“…Different principles of operation were under discussion to be applied as particle number detectors [4]. The most commonly used PM sensors, such as those in ambient air monitoring [28,29], exposure assessment [30][31][32][33][34], vehicle cabin air quality [35], or even filter monitoring in diesel exhaust [36][37][38], were not applicable to vehicle exhaust due to their relatively large lower size, high detection limit, or slow response time. Currently, there are two concepts for the particle sensors (detectors) inside the on-board systems: condensation particle counters (CPCs), similar to those in laboratory systems, and advanced diffusion chargers (DCs) [4,39,40].…”

An Interdisciplinary Review of Smart Vehicular Traffic and Its Applications and Challenges

“…While some attempts at integration has been done in the context of environmental monitoring, involving sensors for temperature, relative humidity, dew point, gas, wind, rain, and atmospheric pressure [49,50], the benefits of integration extend to traffic monitoring, where sensor readings are complemented with contextual data. Traffic monitoring is conducted by sensing capabilities, the GPS receivers installed on modern vehicles and a mixture of air quality sensor and acoustic sensors along the given road [51].…”

Millimeter-sized particle sensor using a wide field of view monolithic lens assembly for light scattering analysis in Fourier domain

“…However, we still rely on conventional air quality monitoring ground stations that cannot deliver the required spatiotemporal resolution of air quality (indoor and outdoor [6]). This raises the urgent need for personal air quality monitors that are low cost and portable [7] [8]. In this document, we report our latest developments concerning miniature optical PM sensors.…”