Environmental quality monitoring system based on internet of things for laboratory conditions supervision

Abstract

Indoor environment quality (IEQ) has a significant impact on health and in all human activities. On the one hand, laboratories are spaces characterised by numerous pollution sources that can lead to relevant unhealthy indoor environments. On the other hand, experimental testing requires the supervision of several indoor parameters, such as the case of thermography experiments. With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies, there is a great potential to create automatic solutions for IEQ supervision. In fact, due to people spend about 90% of our lives indoors, it is crucial to monitor the IEQ in real-time to detect unhealthy conditions to quickly take interventions in the building for enhanced living environments and occupational health. Buildings are responsible for about 40% of the global energy consumption, and over 30% of the CO2 emissions; also a considerable proportion of this energy is used for thermal comfort. This paper aims to present a solution for real-time supervision of laboratory environmental conditions based on IoT architecture named iLabM. The solution is composed by a hardware prototype for ambient data collection and smartphone compatibility for data consulting. The iLabM provides temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure and qualitative air quality data supervision in real-time. The smartphone application can be used to access the collected data in real time but also provides the history of the IEQ data. The results obtained are promising, representing a significant contribution to IEQ monitoring systems based on IoT.