A viable prototype device for air quality and heart rate monitoring using Internet of Things (IoTs)

Abstract

Air pollution poses a serious risk to everyone's health and well-being, especially the health of young people, the elderly ones, and people who have trouble breathing. All contaminants, such as gases, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and biologically generated particles that are found in the atmosphere are referred to as air pollutants. The traditional ways of monitoring pollution are quite laborious and inefficient enough. It is pertinent to mitigate the excessive air pollution that is detrimental to people's and other living things' health. This bring motivation to carried out the objective of developing a device, an air pollution detector (APD) that monitors and measures both the quality of air and heart rate in a given environment. The IoT devices were used to collate data within a geographical area. The air data collected through MQ 135 sensor were calibrated and processed using Arduino programming language. The LCD module displays the air pollution data with the pulse of heartbeat in beats per minute (BPM) once the air gets denser. The system was tested in different five location on school's campus environments at Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria. Two sets of tests were carried out to measure air quality index (AQI) and the pulse. The tests carried out were based on the effect of time of day on AQI and heart rate (HR) in action and resting heart rate (RHR) respectively taking one-hour intervals from 8am to 8pm. The obtained sensitivity results showed that, a higher concentration of air pollution leads to an increase in heart rate and a lower concentration of pollution leads to a decrease in heart rate. Hence, the affordable and eco-friendly developed system has the potential to be used as a tool to explore for researchers, students and bringing awareness on the types of air pollutants for the general public.