TY - JOUR

T1 - An evaluation tool kit of air quality micro-sensing units

AU - Fishbain, Barak

AU - Lerner, Uri

AU - Castell, Nuria

AU - Cole-Hunter, Tom

AU - Popoola, Olalekan

AU - Broday, David M.

AU - Martinez Iñiguez, Tania

AU - Nieuwenhuijsen, Mark

AU - Jovasevic-Stojanovic, Milena

AU - Topalovic, Dusan

AU - Jones, Roderic L.

AU - Galea, Karen S.

AU - FadiKizel, Yael Etziona

AU - Golumbic, Yaela N.

AU - Baram-Tsabari, Ayelet

AU - Yacobi, Tamar

AU - Drahler, Dana

AU - Robinson, Johanna A.

AU - Kocman, David

AU - Horvat, Milena

AU - Svecova, Vlasta

AU - Arpaci, Alexander

AU - Bartonova, Alena

N1 - Funding Information: CITI-SENSE, initiated in October 2012, is a four year Collaborative Project partly funded by the EU FP7-ENV-2012 under grant agreement 308524. Funding Information: We would like to acknowledge the AQM station managers for providing ambient air quality data, including the Haifa District Municipal Association for Environmental Protection (Israel); Xarxa de Vigilància i Previsió de la Contaminació Atmosfèrica de Catalunya (XVPCA), Direcció General de la Qualitat Ambiental, Departament de Territori i Sostenibilitat, Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain); the Slovenian Environment Agency (Slovenia); the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (Czech Republic); Bureau Veritas, UK Ltd. (Edinburgh); the Serbian Environmental Protection Agency – SEPA (Serbia). Publisher Copyright: © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

PY - 2017/1/1

Y1 - 2017/1/1

N2 - Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made the development of portable air-quality (AQ) micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs allow AQ measurements in many new applications, such as ambulatory exposure analyses and citizen science. Typically, the performance of these devices is assessed using the mean error or correlation coefficients with respect to a laboratory equipment. However, these criteria do not represent how such sensors perform outside of laboratory conditions in large-scale field applications, and do not cover all aspects of possible differences in performance between the sensor-based and standardized equipment, or changes in performance over time. This paper presents a comprehensive Sensor Evaluation Toolbox (SET) for evaluating AQ MSUs by a range of criteria, to better assess their performance in varied applications and environments. Within the SET are included four new schemes for evaluating sensors' capability to: locate pollution sources; represent the pollution level on a coarse scale; capture the high temporal variability of the observed pollutant and their reliability. Each of the evaluation criteria allows for assessing sensors' performance in a different way, together constituting a holistic evaluation of the suitability and usability of the sensors in a wide range of applications. Application of the SET on measurements acquired by 25 MSUs deployed in eight cities across Europe showed that the suggested schemes facilitates a comprehensive cross platform analysis that can be used to determine and compare the sensors' performance. The SET was implemented in R and the code is available on the first author's website.

AB - Recent developments in sensory and communication technologies have made the development of portable air-quality (AQ) micro-sensing units (MSUs) feasible. These MSUs allow AQ measurements in many new applications, such as ambulatory exposure analyses and citizen science. Typically, the performance of these devices is assessed using the mean error or correlation coefficients with respect to a laboratory equipment. However, these criteria do not represent how such sensors perform outside of laboratory conditions in large-scale field applications, and do not cover all aspects of possible differences in performance between the sensor-based and standardized equipment, or changes in performance over time. This paper presents a comprehensive Sensor Evaluation Toolbox (SET) for evaluating AQ MSUs by a range of criteria, to better assess their performance in varied applications and environments. Within the SET are included four new schemes for evaluating sensors' capability to: locate pollution sources; represent the pollution level on a coarse scale; capture the high temporal variability of the observed pollutant and their reliability. Each of the evaluation criteria allows for assessing sensors' performance in a different way, together constituting a holistic evaluation of the suitability and usability of the sensors in a wide range of applications. Application of the SET on measurements acquired by 25 MSUs deployed in eight cities across Europe showed that the suggested schemes facilitates a comprehensive cross platform analysis that can be used to determine and compare the sensors' performance. The SET was implemented in R and the code is available on the first author's website.

KW - Air quality

KW - Environmental monitoring

KW - Micro sensing units

KW - Sensors performance

KW - Wireless distributed sensor network

U2 - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.09.061

DO - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.09.061

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 27678046

AN - SCOPUS:84995814985

VL - 575

SP - 639

EP - 648

JO - Science of the Total Environment

JF - Science of the Total Environment

SN - 0048-9697

ER -