Nowadays, monitoring and control of outdoor and especially indoor air quality emerged as an ever growing and significant problem. Currently, there are several products and services dedicated to this purpose, but, as a rule, with some limitations such as: high cost, proprietary ecosystems, reduced privacy, remote data storage, lack of versatility or modularity.
The AirMon project, developed in the context of FCT/UFP, in partnership between IT teachers from the ISUS group and teachers from the environment area, aims to develop a sensor network with the purpose of monitoring important parameters of air quality in a hospital environment.
The project has been running since 2020, and is now in a testing phase of a monitoring network consisting of 3 sensor units and a gateway. Each sensor unit contains sensors for: CO2, CO, O3, NO2, NH3, Particle Sensor, temperature and humidity.
The sensor units use long-range, low-energy LoRa wireless communication technology to ensure wide space coverage and placement versatility in hard-to-reach places without supporting communication infrastructure. The gateway unit interconnects the LoRa network with the WiFi network, allowing the transmission of readings to a database. These measurements are recorded in a database and are available for consultation through a web-based dashboard.
The ISUS team, led by professor Pedro Sobral, is also made up of professors Christophe Soares, José Manuel Torres and Rui Moreira. Still in the IT component, the main contribution to the development of the project was guaranteed by the undergraduate and master’s students of informatics João Reis and Rodrigo Soares, who carried out as their final course project a substantial part of what is now the prototype being tested. On the environmental side, the team included professors Nelson Barros, Ana Fonseca, Isabel Abreu and Maria João Guerreiro.
The next phase of the project foresees the installation of a network of sensor units in the Universidade Fernando Pessoa Hospital, HE-UFP, located in Gondomar.
