IAQ Evaluation Using an IoT CO₂ Monitoring System for Enhanced Living Environments

Indoor air quality (IAQ) parameters are not only directly related to occupational health but also have a huge impact on quality of life. In particular, besides having a very influence on the public health as it may cause a great variety of health effects such as headaches, dizziness, restlessness, difficulty breathing, increase heart rate, elevated blood pressure, coma and asphyxia, carbon dioxide (CO₂) can be used as an important index of IAQ. In fact, due to people spend about 90% of our lives indoors, it is extremely important to monitor the CO₂ concentration in real-time to detect problems in the IAQ in order to quickly take interventions in the building to increase the IAQ. The variation of CO₂ in indoor living environments is in most situations related to the low air renewal inside buildings. CO₂ levels over 1000 ppm, indicate a potential problem with indoor air. This paper aims to present iAirC a solution for CO₂ real-time monitoring based on Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. This solution is composed by a hardware prototype for ambient data collection and a web and smartphone compatibility for data consulting. This system performs real-time data collection that is stored in a ThingSpeak platform and has smartphone compatibility which allows easier access to data in real time. The user can also check the latest data collected by the system and access to the history of the CO₂ levels in a graphical representation. iAirC uses an open-source ESP8266 for Wi-Fi 2.4 GHZ as processing and communication unit and incorporates a CO₂ sensor as sensing unit.