Towards A Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring System in Mega-Cities: Design and Deployment

Over the past few decades, air quality in Southeast Asia, particularly in some mega-cities, has deteriorated rapidly. Particulate Matter (PM) in this region, which is a key parameter to calculate the Air Quality Index (AQI), frequently exceeds the safe limit (at or below 12 μg/m 3 ) recommended by the World Health Organization. Despite the significant negative impacts of poor air quality on human health, there are very few air quality monitoring (AQM) stations in this region which severely limits the evaluation of location-based air quality. Moreover, currently, available air quality monitoring devices are quite expensive, making it impractical to deploy them all over the cities, considering the economy of a least developed nation such as Bangladesh. In this work, we propose an IoT-based portable air quality measurement device that can measure Particulate Matter (PM1, PM2.5, and PM10) as well as temperature and humidity, with the least developed nations' explicit requirements and financial constraints in mind. The device accuracy is measured by recorded PM values and verified across multiple devices.