Air quality monitoring and alerting system to help in reducing asthma attack in asthmatic children

Abstract

Asthma attack is one of the most common emergency cases seen in hospitals. It can be dramatically triggered by environmental factors such as air pollution, temperature and humidity. In this paper, we developed a system to avoid asthma attacks, especially for children, by informing parents about the air quality conditions. Our developed prototype system consists of two main subsystems that communicate wirelessly. The first subsystem is an Air-Quality Sensing Subsystem, and the second subsystem is a mobile phone application. The Air-Quality Sensing Subsystem (AQSS) collects data from surrounding environment about the air-quality using different sensors that measure the main environmental factors (temperature, humidity, dust, and Carbon Monoxide (CO)) that trigger asthma attack in our region (Qatar). This subsystem processes the collected data and decides whether the air-quality is safe for asthmatic children. The processed data along with alerting messages are sent to the smart-phone app wirelessly using Bluetooth technology. The Smart-phone app shows the measured air-quality factors as well as sends a message to inform the parents if the air-quality outside is safe for their asthmatic children or not. Accordingly, parents can take precautions to protect their asthmatic children from having asthma attack. This would help in stabilizing the health condition of asthmatic children/person and avoid costly hospitalization procedures.