ECE.16R – Air and Radiance Monitoring System

Environmental pollution, a major issue since the industrial age, has led to global warming, severe weather, larger wildfires, ozone layer depletion, and wildlife habitat destruction. It also negatively impacts public health through the effects of climate change and energy choices. The global population faces common challenges, necessitating innovative engineering solutions. Advances in technology now offer more powerful, smarter, and smaller devices to address and mitigate these problems. The MARJ team wishes to join this progression, and created the ARMS (Air and Radiance Monitoring System) smart band capable of monitoring real time, localized exposure to ultraviolet radiation and air pollution, all while maintaining minimal power consumption. The goal is to help people stay vigilant regarding their health and the impact of environmental effects by using personalization to make it easier for sensitive groups to stay informed. Existing commercial products have succeeded in accomplishing most of our functionality, but personalization and wearable implementation are still very limited and have much room for improvement. Our design specifications were further refined through user surveys and engineering requirements. The band is also accompanied by a fully-fledged application for the best user experience and is responsible for most of the user interaction. Our results were compared with a well known competitor device, the ATMO Tube, with an approximate deviation of only 5 units across multiple pollutants. The device is capable of reading particle pollution, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide with high accuracy. Our Personalized Air Quality Range, a custom air quality monitoring system developed by our team and our main application feature, was built on top of our individual pollutant calculations and was fine tuned to meet our specifications and maximize interaction, feedback and personalization for any user, including those with well known diseases/age-dependencies that are heavily impacted by the air, such as heart disease, asthma, and other lung diseases. The PAQR is an experimental system that uses cumulative air quality equations, such as individual pollutant scores and weights that are based on user sensitivity, to summarize the local air quality, unlike conventional AQI systems curated by most government agencies. The UV monitor, included in our application, is also tuned based on the user’s age, which changes threshold notifications for different levels of UV radiation.