Urban air pollution is a major challenge facing expanding cities, where environmental impacts intensify emissions from vehicles, industry, and human activity. Accurate monitoring of air pollutants is essential to addressing this challenge.
Traditional air quality monitoring relies on stationary systems positioned around cities, but these systems have limitations, such as missing large urban areas.
KAUST Professor Khaled Nabil Salama, from Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE), and his research team have developed a hybrid strategy for measuring air quality by merging the reliability of stationary systems with the adaptability of mobile units.
This innovative system uses real-time environmental monitors attached to city buses, transforming them into roving sensors that offer a holistic view of urban air quality.
The potential impact of this system is profound. Modern cities strive to reshape urban life by embedding real-time monitoring of urban environments, which provides a foundation for data-informed decisions, such as rerouting traffic during pollution peaks.
This solution is being tested on the KAUST campus, which is the perfect place to test smart city concepts with speed in a real-life controlled environment before they are launched to the world.
Mobile air quality monitors are placed in multiple locations around KAUST, including two color-coded community buses.
Click here to learn more about this exciting project.