Enabling low-cost particulate matter measurement for participatory sensing scenarios

This paper presents a mobile, low-cost particulate matter sensing approach for the use in Participatory Sensing scenarios. It shows that cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) dust sensors can be used in distributed or mobile personal measurement devices at a cost one to two orders of magnitude lower than that of current hand-held solutions, while reaching meaningful accuracy. We conducted a series of experiments to juxtapose the performance of a gauged high-accuracy measurement device and a cheap COTS sensor that we fitted on a Bluetooth-enabled sensor module that can be interconnected with a mobile phone. Calibration and processing procedures using multi-sensor data fusion are presented, that perform very well in lab situations and show practically relevant results in a realistic setting. An on-the-fly calibration correction step is proposed to address remaining issues by taking advantage of co-located measurements in Participatory Sensing scenarios. By sharing few measurement across devices, a high measurement accuracy can be achieved in mobile urban sensing applications, where devices join in an ad-hoc fashion. A performance evaluation was conducted by co-locating measurement devices with a municipal measurement station that monitors particulate matter in a European city, and simulations to evaluate the on-the-fly cross-device data processing have been done.