MONITORING CAR CABIN AIR QUALITY USING AN IOT-BASED MICROCONTROLLER

As an average American spends over 8 hours in cars every week, the air quality in a vehicle significantly impacts people's health, but existing indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring systems are either for home use or cars with only limited applications. In this study, a car cabin air quality monitoring system (CCAQMS) was developed with sensors of temperature, humidity, PM2.5, CO, and TVOC. These five parameters have been recognized as essential for monitoring car cabin air quality. The monitoring system was assembled using Arduino YUN with IoT functionality after each sensor was individually calibrated. The CCAQMS was designed to send warning emails when the threshold was exceeded. The air quality in the car was measured simultaneously using the CCAQMS and a commercially available indoor air quality monitoring system. A series of events were created to emulate behaviors that affect car air quality. These event markers exposed the CCAQMS to different situations, and air quality data was received in real-time. The results from the experiment indicated that the CCAQMS performed compared to existing models due to its greater sampling rate as 0.067sample per second. In contrast, the commercial sensor's slow sampling rate did not keep up with the rapidly changing car environment.