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An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring

In recent years, the availability on the market of low-cost sensors (LCSs) and low-cost monitors (LCMs) for air quality monitoring has attracted the interest of scientists, communities, and professionals. Although the scientific community has raised concerns about their data quality, they are still...

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Autores principales: Suriano, Domenico, Prato, Mario
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10143454/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37112317
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23083976
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author Suriano, Domenico
Prato, Mario
author_facet Suriano, Domenico
Prato, Mario
author_sort Suriano, Domenico
collection PubMed
description In recent years, the availability on the market of low-cost sensors (LCSs) and low-cost monitors (LCMs) for air quality monitoring has attracted the interest of scientists, communities, and professionals. Although the scientific community has raised concerns about their data quality, they are still considered a possible alternative to regulatory monitoring stations due to their cheapness, compactness, and lack of maintenance costs. Several studies have performed independent evaluations to investigate their performance, but a comparison of the results is difficult due to the different test conditions and metrics adopted. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to provide a tool for assessing the possible uses of LCSs or LCMs by publishing guidelines to assign suitable application areas for each of them on the basis of the mean normalized bias (MNB) and coefficient of variance (CV) indicators. Until today, very few studies have analyzed LCS performance by referring to the EPA guidelines. This research aimed to understand the performance and the possible application areas of two PM sensor models (PMS5003 and SPS30) on the basis of the EPA guidelines. We computed the R(2), RMSE, MAE, MNB, CV, and other performance indicators and found that the coefficient of determination (R(2)) ranged from 0.55 to 0.61, while the root mean squared error (RMSE) ranged from 11.02 µg/m(3) to 12.09 µg/m(3). Moreover, the application of a correction factor to include the humidity effect produced an improvement in the performance of the PMS5003 sensor models. We also found that, based on the MNB and CV values, the EPA guidelines assigned the SPS30 sensors to the “informal information about the presence of the pollutant” application area (Tier I), while PMS5003 sensors were assigned to the “supplemental monitoring of regulatory networks” area (Tier III). Although the usefulness of the EPA guidelines is acknowledged, it appears that improvements are necessary to increase their effectiveness.
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spelling pubmed-101434542023-04-29 An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring Suriano, Domenico Prato, Mario Sensors (Basel) Article In recent years, the availability on the market of low-cost sensors (LCSs) and low-cost monitors (LCMs) for air quality monitoring has attracted the interest of scientists, communities, and professionals. Although the scientific community has raised concerns about their data quality, they are still considered a possible alternative to regulatory monitoring stations due to their cheapness, compactness, and lack of maintenance costs. Several studies have performed independent evaluations to investigate their performance, but a comparison of the results is difficult due to the different test conditions and metrics adopted. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to provide a tool for assessing the possible uses of LCSs or LCMs by publishing guidelines to assign suitable application areas for each of them on the basis of the mean normalized bias (MNB) and coefficient of variance (CV) indicators. Until today, very few studies have analyzed LCS performance by referring to the EPA guidelines. This research aimed to understand the performance and the possible application areas of two PM sensor models (PMS5003 and SPS30) on the basis of the EPA guidelines. We computed the R(2), RMSE, MAE, MNB, CV, and other performance indicators and found that the coefficient of determination (R(2)) ranged from 0.55 to 0.61, while the root mean squared error (RMSE) ranged from 11.02 µg/m(3) to 12.09 µg/m(3). Moreover, the application of a correction factor to include the humidity effect produced an improvement in the performance of the PMS5003 sensor models. We also found that, based on the MNB and CV values, the EPA guidelines assigned the SPS30 sensors to the “informal information about the presence of the pollutant” application area (Tier I), while PMS5003 sensors were assigned to the “supplemental monitoring of regulatory networks” area (Tier III). Although the usefulness of the EPA guidelines is acknowledged, it appears that improvements are necessary to increase their effectiveness. MDPI 2023-04-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10143454/ /pubmed/37112317 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23083976 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Suriano, Domenico
Prato, Mario
An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title_full An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title_fullStr An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title_full_unstemmed An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title_short An Investigation on the Possible Application Areas of Low-Cost PM Sensors for Air Quality Monitoring
title_sort investigation on the possible application areas of low-cost pm sensors for air quality monitoring
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10143454/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37112317
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s23083976
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