Preliminary studies on autonomous sensor systems dedicated to air quality monitoring

Abstract

Sensor systems and smart networks devoted to environmental supervision have today assisted the analysis of primal processes and they have also provided vital hazard early warnings. At the same time the use of environmental energy is now rising up as a potential energy source dedicated to embedded and wireless computing systems where manual recharging and/or replacement of hundreds or even thousands of batteries on a regular basis is not practical. This paper presents and illustrates SENNO (SENsor NOde), a multi-parametric sensor node that intelligently manages energy transfer for perpetual operation without human intervention during air quality monitoring. The overall system design and experimental results are presented together with energy budget allocation. Preliminary results demonstrate that, after a tailored calibration process, the presented platform could effectively report and trace air quality levels in a sort of "set and forget" scenario.