Designing a low-cost wireless sensor network for particulate matter monitoring: Implementation, calibration, and field-test

Poor air quality can provoke severe impacts on health, necessitating environmental monitoring of atmospheric particulate matter (PM) to assess potential threats to human well-being. However, traditional continuous air quality monitoring systems are often costly and time-consuming in data treatment. Lately, there is a growing trend towards the use of low-cost wireless PM sensors, providing more detailed information than standard systems. This paper presents a system designed to measure air quality, specifically, a wireless sensor network composed of a distributed sensor network linked to a cloud system. The proposed system can efficiently measure air quality as it is cost-effective, small-sized, and consumes little power. Sensor nodes based on low-power long range (LoRa) motes transmit field measurement data to the cloud via a gateway, and a cloud computing system is implemented to store, monitor, process, and visualise the data. Advanced techniques were included in our cloud for data processing and analysis to optimise the detection of PM. Laboratory and field tests in the historic Riotinto mine validate the system's viability, offering real-time air quality information for nearby populations. Once calibrated, sensors demonstrate high accuracy, presenting mean error of −0.3% and low deviation (R² = 0.96) when compared to regulatory systems for both low (<10 μgPM₁₀/m³) and hazardous concentrations (300 μgPM₁₀/m³), which makes them perfect as early warning systems for atmospheric pollution in mining.