An Internet of Things Platform based on FIWARE for Air Quality Remote Sensing and Smart Monitoring

~ Jeevitha B., 3rd year, B.E. Geoinformatics

Air pollution is currently receiving huge attention by international governments and organizations Air pollution can seriously affect people’s health, worsening certain illnesses or even causing death to specific vulnerable groups. Our primary aim henceforth, should be to alert the vulnerable population and vehemently encourage them to act upon it However, this kind of personalized services can become complex in Internet of Things (IoT) applications because of the large quantum of data required to be analysed in order to perform a suitable customization of such services

The major limitation imposed in other methods of air quality assessment is impossibility of processing data in Near Real-Time (NRT) for remote sensing approaches In order to tackle such challenges, IoT platform based on FIWARE can be used for remote sensing and smart monitoring of air stations. FIWARE is an open-source initiative that works towards building a set of standards to develop FIWARE provides novel software components available through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), known as Generic Enablers (GEs), that allow us to reduce the time needed for developing the whole solution, as well as increasing the scalability, modularity and flexibility of the solution The FIWARE-based smart platform has the ability to process and correlate big data coming from multiple air information sources and to notify users in real-time when a health risk for their particular context is detected In addition, a mobile application benefits from the platform since it allows users to register and receive air quality alerts depending on their situational context

The major functions of FIWARE based systems include: (1) air quality information and alerts updates to be given in real time; (2) the information has to be actively provided to citizens in a clear and userfriendly way; (3) the information provided to users, in particular to “at-risk” groups, needs to be adapted to their specific characteristics and (4) the system should also take into account the type of activity the user is going to carry out and adapt notifications accordingly.FIWARE based IoT systems make use of Complex Event Processing (CEP) Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a cutting-edge technology that allows us to correlate and analyse huge amounts of data in real time The platform is divided into many layers namely, Data Producers, Data Collector, Data Processing and Data Consumers

Air quality surveillance can be done using air sensor networks Particles Matter smaller than 10 or 2.5microns (PM2.5 and PM10), Sulphur Dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Carbon Monoxide (CO) and Ozone (O3) are some of the major pollutants monitored by such sensor networks. The sensors located in these stations send the information collected for each pollutant to a main server by General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or Internet, every 10 minutes as CSV files This system integrates a lowcost air quality sensor, temperature and humidity sensors, a single -board computer (Raspberry Pi 2microprocessor) and cloud storage This system provides Realtime air quality reading, transfers the data through a wireless network to the Internet and displays the data in dedicated webpage. Furthermore, it stores records in cloud storage and sends message to the user when unhealthy condition is met The same Iot based approach can be done with other cloud-based platforms such as open-source platforms like OpenMTC and SiteWhere, and by the proprietary ones like Amazon Web Services The most relevant difference between these platforms and FIWARE is that none of them deals with the user’s particular situational context nor do they provide recommended air quality notifications based on citizen’s personal, spatial as well as physical contexts