Assessment of Indoor Air Quality of Educational Facilities using an IoT Solution for a Healthy Learning Environment

摘要

Indoor air quality and other such environmental factors influence the studying capabilities and overall well-being of students in educational facilities, such as university lecture halls, laboratories, and dormitories. Unfortunately, it was shown that CO2 level, temperature, humidity, noise, and illumination are in many cases far from optimal or even out of the range allowed by national standards in such facilities. Furthermore, insufficient information is available about this problem, and it is quite likely, that this problem is wide scale, and low-cost monitoring solutions do not exist, so it very hard to assess the situation. In the paper, we present an environmental monitoring solution based on the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, primarily for educational facilities, which can be reproduced with minimal investment. The system based on low-cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless sensor boards and a BLE-WIFI gateway using a single-board computer (SBC) board. The software components are open source, so the system can be further modified and customized for the local requirements. The system uses SNMP and the open-source WEB-based CACTI monitoring framework to collect and present data. The system does not only make it possible to monitor these environmental parameters in real-time but can provide feedback for the occupants of the facility using LEDs on the sensor boards.