Development of a Low-Cost Particulate Matter Optical Sensor for Real-Time Monitoring

Air pollution is a critical public health problem that has increased during the past decades. High levels of air pollution have affected natural environments and people’s health, causing significant problems and, in severe cases, premature death. A growing trend called “Personal air monitoring” has become important for prevention of and reduction in exposure to air pollutants. The development of personal particulate matter sensors is still a topic of study among the scientific community. Some important identified challenges are improving the sample rate, precision, stability, dimensions and costs, making personal monitoring of air quality affordable. This work proposes the development of a low-cost particulate matter optical sensor to count the number of particles in real time using the Arduino platform and wireless transmission. Our results demonstrated that using a digital input of the microcontroller instead of the analog–digital converter, after conditioning the sensor signal, allows a very high max particle count, which can be compared to that of expensive sensors. In addition, particulate matter (PM) measurements were compared with a GP2Y1014AU0F dust sensor to validate the accuracy of the sensor.