Libelium Air Quality Station for a more practical, intelligent and granular pollution measurement

Air Quality in cities for conscious citizens

We’ve heard the number so many times that it seems like it doesn’t sound important anymore: Outdoor air pollution kills an estimated 4.2 million people worldwide each year.

And it is not only human lives that are lost. Up to 18% of the total global economy could be lost by 2050 if temperatures rise by 3.2°C. By mid-century, GDP could be around 4.2% lower than in a world where climate change had never happened.

Cities need to reduce pollution and temperature to grant the health and future of citizens and the planet.

The challenge we solve with AQS for polluted cities

Very expensive parameters to monitor

Most cities have powerful reference stations to measure the Air Quality Index for taking actions and measures to maintain it at healthy levels.

Reference stations to measure European Air Quality Index.

Reference stations are publicly owned high-performance air quality measurement stations. These stations are small chemical laboratories. All of them usually have similar characteristics: extreme quality in all their dimensions (precision, repeatability, reliability, etc.) and their measurements have “legal value” since there are official directives that clearly describe how they must be, the number that must be in each municipality, etc.

However, these stations cost well over 200,000 euros, they are not autonomous (they require electricity) and the measurement methods are sometimes not very automated. For example, particulate matter is not measured by a sensor, but by a filter that captures the particles. The operator has to physically access the station to collect samples for several days and weigh the micrograms of particulate matter for each period on a precision balance.

A month since the last sample.

Libelium Air Quality Station for more granularity

While these stations offer high-quality measurement, their high acquisition and operating costs make it possible to deploy only a few of them. It is desirable higher spatial granularity, with a much larger number of reference stations, but is also complicated due to economic reasons.

Libelium Air Quality Station responds to this demand.

Libelium Air Quality Station

Libelium’s new Air Quality Station allows the measurement of the five most important pollutant gases (CO, NO, NO2, SO2, and O3) as well as particulate matter (PM1, PM2.5, and PM10), weather conditions, and noise levels. The device includes communication via 4G, and rich remote management thanks to advanced cloud that facilitates OTA (over the air) programming and reconfiguration.

But is much more than a mere data capturer.

A more practical station that learns

Libelium Air Quality Station has Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning inside that allows it to “learn” from the reference station calibration by co-location. This means placing a smart air quality station next to the reference station and having it learn from the data it generates. It can then share the data with other air quality stations located in different parts of the city.

In this way, the device learns and improves its accuracy as it acquires data that is compared and analyzed with those recorded by official reference stations.

It also allows real-time data visualization through its multiple Clouds compatibility. Libelium Cloud provides different graphs, dashboards and alerts.

Libelium Air Quality Station in the Libelium Cloud

In addition, Libelium Air Quality Station has a very compact size to be relocatable and easy to install.

Libelium Air Quality Station is not intended to comply with stringent European regulations, but offers a compromise solution: in exchange for relaxing the technical requirements, municipalities and other public authorities can install a much larger number of air quality measuring devices to provide them with a more complete map of air pollution.

Tested and improved R2

Libelium Air Quality station has been tested in five different locations to train its algorithm to get the best R² in the market. The term R² is a very common and vital concept, but it can be complex and misleading. The coefficient of determination (R²) measures a comparison between an air quality device and another taken as a reference. The closer to 1, the better the device imitates the performance of the reference device.

Beyond the challenge

Thanks to its intelligence and compatibility with different clouds through the Libelium Cloud, the Libelium Air Quality Station can work on comprehensive city pollution control solutions to, for example, limit speed in the city center, close streets to traffic, fine automatically or establish more dynamic and efficient Low Emission Zones policies to name a few use cases.