Rnmonitor: An iot-enabled platform for radon risk management in public buildings

Abstract

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that can easily accumulate in indoor environments, being classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the second most important cause of lung cancer after tobacco, negatively impacting public health. The presence of this gas indoors tends to increase in regions were the subsoil presents a higher granitic prevalence, such as the northern and central interior regions of Portugal. The paper introduces RnMonitor, a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) with humans-in-the-loop specifically designed for online monitoring and active mitigation of radon risk in public buildings. The system takes advantage of an IoT device specifically designed to acquire radon concentration and other relevant Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and consequently transmit the collected data, using a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), to a cloud-engine for reasoning and therefore trigger specific mitigation actions, e.g. manual ventilation.