A cheap and third-age-friendly home device for monitoring indoor air quality

Nowadays, thanks to the hardware costs reduction everyone at home owns at least one hi-technology devices to support life quality. This paper proposes a new methodology to analyse the indoor air quality with a cheap and third-age-dedicated device. A new prototype, called Home Pollution Embedded System (HOPES), was developed to give simple and understandable information, also comprehensible for people with cognitive problems or that are not familiar with new technologies. The device gathers pollutants data and displays to the user different air pollutants concentrations, from toxics gasses up to explosives. Moreover, an overall air quality index has been elaborated and is displayed by HOPES with lights and numerical information. HOPES is an Internet of things device that works in real time and that can be connected to the web and to a geographic information system platform to add spatial information of each pollutant. The hardware architecture employs a set of gas semiconductor sensors and an IR particulate matter sensor. Experimental results demonstrated that HOPES has an accurate sensor response and is suitable to be used with the proposed indices. In fact, despite of the poor-selective metal oxide sensors, the results highlighted how it is possible to get useful air quality information with a cheap device. However, the system needs more tests to validate the sensors array with different substances.