Air Qality Sensor Network Data Acquisition, Cleaning,
Visualization, and Analytics: A Real-world IoT Use Case
Federica Rollo
University of Modena and
Reggio Emilia
‘Enzo Ferrari’ Engineering
Department
Italy
federica.rollo@unimore.it
Bharath Sudharsan
National University of
Ireland, Galway
Data Science Institute
Ireland
b.sudharsan1@nuigalway.ie
Laura Po
University of Modena and
Reggio Emilia
‘Enzo Ferrari’ Engineering
Department
Italy
laura.po@unimore.it
John Breslin
National University of
Ireland, Galway
Data Science Institute
Ireland
john.breslin@nuigalway.ie
ABSTRACT
Monitoring and analyzing air quality is of primary importance to encour-
age more sustainable lifestyles and plan corrective actions. This paper
presents the design and end-to-end implementation
1
of a real-world ur-
ban air quality data collection and analytics use case which is a part of the
TRAFAIR (Understanding Trafc Flows to Improve Air Quality) European
project [1, 2]. This implementation is related to the project work done
in Modena city, Italy, starting from distributed low-cost multi-sensor
IoT devices installation, LoRa network setup, data collection at LoRa
server database, ML-based anomaly measurement detection plus clean-
ing, sensor calibration, central control and visualization using designed
SenseBoard [3].
KEYWORDS
IoT Analytics, Anomalies Detection, Real-world Applications.
ACM Reference Format:
Federica Rollo, Bharath Sudharsan, Laura Po, and John Breslin. 2021. Air Quality
Sensor Network Data Acquisition, Cleaning, Visualization, and Analytics: A Real-
world IoT Use Case. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Joint
Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2021 ACM
International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp-ISWC ’21 Adjunct),
September 21–26, 2021, Virtual, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https:
//doi.org/10.1145/3460418.3479277
1 INTRODUCTION
Urban air pollution is a serious public health hazard in many EU cities. In
this paper, we employ low-cost IoT devices to monitor air quality in mul-
tiple location points at an urban scale. Using low-cost sensors is the only
way to be able to carry out hyper-local monitoring in a city. However,
managing low-cost AQ sensors is challenging. They are less reliable than
the Air Quality Monitoring (AQM) legal stations and require a complex
calibration process to obtain pollutant concentration data from the raw
observations in millivolt they measured. The deployed implementation
allows building a historical air quality dataset that contains accurate (cal-
ibrated with great precision close to AQM stations) and reliable (resilient
LoRa networks) concentrations of air pollutants. These data can be the
foundation for European Environment Agency (EEA), World Health Or-
ganization (WHO), other e-government bodies to design ML algorithms
for advanced air-quality analytics.
1
Code released at https://github.com/bharathsudharsan/Air-Quality-IoT-Analytics
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom
use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or
commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page.
Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses,
contact the owner/author(s).
UbiComp-ISWC ’21 Adjunct, September 21–26, 2021, Virtual, USA
© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8461-2/21/09.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3460418.3479277
Figure 1: Infrastructure design and implementation for the air-
quality dataset build and analytics use case.
2 IMPLEMENTATION
In implementation Step I (Section 2.1), we explain the IoT device installa-
tion plus data acquisition process, then apply ML algorithms to detect
anomalies and clean collected sensor data. In Step II (Section 2.2), we
present the designed visualization platform to monitor and control the IoT
devices and LoRa network. In Step III (Section 2.3), we present example
analytics applications of our dataset.
2.1 Data Acquisition and Cleaning
Numerous IoT devices are exploited to monitor and collect the pollution
level on an urban scale in Modena, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, Santiago
de Compostela, and Zaragoza (cities in Italy and Spain). As shown in
67