Smart city developments: Pilot case study of smart benches usage for impact assessment due to exposure to air pollution in the urban environment

Air pollution remains one of the leading environmental risk factors for morbidity and mortality worldwide and its impacts are most acutely felt in dense urban environments where residents can be exposed to elevated pollutant levels for extended periods each day. Reliable, spatially resolved exposure and health-impact data at the neighborhood scale are still scarce, limiting the ability of municipalities to design targeted mitigation measures. To help close this gap, the present pilot study uses a low-cost, IoT-enabled “smart bench” monitoring station, deployed within the FAIRCITY project, to assess citizen exposure to ambient air pollutants and the associated short-term health impacts in a densely populated district of the Attica region, Greece. Mobile, low-cost sensors were used to measure four atmospheric pollutants (PM 2.5 , PM 10 , NO 2 and O 3 ) that are typically present in the urban environment. Using well documented exposure methodology, population exposure and the received dose were estimated for two representative population groups. The impact of short-term exposure on hospital admissions for respiratory disease was then quantified with the AirQ​+ software developed by WHO. The preliminary results indicated that O 3 concentrations were more than double those of PM 2.5 , PM 10 and NO 2 , and that pollutant levels exhibited a marked seasonal profile, most notably for NO 2 , which doubled during the cold season, while PM 10 exceeded the current EU limit value in both seasons. The exposure scenarios indicated that adolescents experienced roughly double the exposure of the general population to all studied pollutants, reflecting the longer daily time they spent in the study area, whereas the estimated health impacts, expressed as hospital admissions attributable to respiratory disease, were about one order of magnitude higher for the general working-age population, consistent with its larger population base. These findings quantitatively illustrate the value of low-cost mobile sensors for the realistic assessment of local air quality and public-health impact and support the case for local climate and air-quality action as a contribution to global health protection.