oa HAWA'AK: An end-to-end air quality monitoring system for Qatar

The effect of air pollution on human health is considered a major and serious problem, globally. The purpose of air quality monitoring is not merely to collect data but to provide the information required by scientists, policy-makers and planners to enable them to make informed decisions on managing and improving the environment, as well as to present useful information for public end-users. Monitoring fulfills a central role in this process, providing the necessary, sound scientific basis for developing policies and strategies, setting objectives, assessing compliance with targets and planning enforcement action. Traditionally, bulky air quality monitoring stations are used for collecting various gas concentrations. These stations include many reference analyzers. Although they have a high level of accuracy, such stations require frequent calibration and maintenance and they need access to power sockets mainly for air conditioning, which limits their use on a large scale. Research and industrial bodies are focusing on developing a new generation of sensing stations at a low cost, smaller size, and with more mobility features. Variations of such stations are being used in different indoor and outdoor environments for both residential and industrial applications. These sensor stations are generally deployed as a wireless sensor network (WSN). A WSN is composed of a number of sensing stations transmitting wirelessly the information they capture. A sensing station is generally composed of a power unit, processing unit, sensing unit, and communication unit. In this work, a real-time air quality monitoring system is presented. This system is based on utilizing multi-gas (MG) monitoring stations that communicate with a platform by means of machine-to-machine communication. Each MG monitoring station includes gaseous sensing elements, a data logging component, and a wireless communication board. They are powered by solar energy. The platform is located on a backend server where data cleaning and filtering operations are carried out. In addition, this platform converts the received data to useful information that is delivered to users through web portal and mobile applications. The system uses a high density of sensing stations per unit area in order to provide localized pollution information, as opposed to bulky analyzers deployed in limited numbers.