Smart Air Quality: IoT/WoT system for indoor air quality monitoring

The concept of indoor air quality applies to non-industrial environments, such as office buildings, public buildings (schools, leisure venues, restaurants), and private homes. In those years it had gained particular relevance through its association with the concept of sick building syndrome, which encompassed a wide range of symptoms or illnesses that people who worked or lived in a building attributed to the building itself.

In the workplace, air quality in offices and general service premises had an increasing impact. Although the symptoms shown by affected people were usually not severe, they could affect both the physical and mental health of workers, causing greater stress and reduced work performance. Enclosed environments without natural ventilation, such as offices, public buildings, schools, day care centers, or residential care homes, could become areas of exposure to pollutants whose magnitude was difficult to determine, since traditional industrial hygiene techniques were often insufficient to identify their root causes.

The project addressed this problem by designing and deploying an IoT/WoT system to measure indoor air quality, applicable from the perspective of safety, hygiene, or comfort in both homes and public places. As a specific use case, the project worked in hospitals, using cleaning carts (which followed a schedule and predefined routes covering most of the hospital's rooms on each shift) as a platform for generating air quality reports in non-critical processes and alarms in critical processes.

The project pursued two main objectives: to create a complete indoor air quality monitoring system based on IoT/WoT, which would facilitate on-site, real-time decision-making through artificial intelligence algorithms applied on devices created specifically for hospital working conditions; and to create a technological solution, within the Internet of Things paradigm, capable of addressing typical problems in this field (interoperability, description, security) in a standardized way, allowing the devices produced to be reused in application scenarios other than hospitals.