Low-cost, multimodal environmental monitoring based on the Internet of Things

Monitoring Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) is of growing interest for health and wellbeing. New building standards, climate targets and adoption of homeworking strategies are creating needs for scalable, monitoring solutions with onward Cloud connectivity. Low-cost Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors have potential to address these needs, enabling development of bespoke multimodal devices. Here, we present insights into the development of a MEMS-based Internet of things (IoT) enabled multimodal device for IEQ monitoring. A study was conducted to establish the inter-device variability and validity to reference standard sensors/devices. For the multimodal, IEQ monitor, intraclass correlations and Bland-Altman analyses indicated good inter-sensor reliability and good-to-excellent agreement for most sensors. All low-cost sensors were found to respond to environmental changes. Many sensors reported low accuracy but high precision meaning they could be calibrated against reference sensors to increase accuracy. The multimodal device developed here was identified as being fit-for-purpose, providing general indicators of environmental changes for continuous IEQ monitoring.

室内环境质量（Indoor Environmental Quality, IEQ）监测对于人类健康与福祉的重要性与日俱增。新建筑标准、气候目标的推行以及居家办公策略的普及，催生了对可扩展且支持云端互联的监测解决方案的需求。低成本微机电系统（Micro-Electromechanical Systems, MEMS）传感器具备满足此类需求的潜力，可推动定制化多模态设备的研发。本文针对一款基于MEMS的支持物联网（Internet of Things, IoT）的多模态室内环境质量监测设备的开发过程分享相关研究见解。研究人员开展了一项实验，以明确该设备的设备间变异性，并验证其与参考标准传感器/设备的符合性。针对这款多模态IEQ监测设备，组内相关系数（intraclass correlations）与布兰德-奥特曼分析（Bland-Altman analyses）结果显示，多数传感器具备良好的传感器间可靠性，且一致性表现为良好至优秀水平。所有低成本传感器均能响应环境变化。多数传感器的实测结果显示其准确度较低但精密度较高，这意味着可通过参考传感器对其进行校准以提升准确度。本研究开发的多模态设备经验证符合预期用途，可为持续室内环境质量监测提供通用的环境变化指标。