AirSense: an intelligent home-based sensing system for indoor air quality analytics

Abstract

In the U.S., people spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors. Unfortunately, indoor air quality (IAQ) may be two to five times worse than the air outdoors, and is often overlooked. Existing IAQ monitoring technologies focus on IAQ measurements and visualization. However, the lack of information about the pollution sources as well as the seriousness of the pollution makes people feel powerless and frustrated, resulting in the ignorance of the polluted air at their homes. In this work, we fill this critical gap by presenting AirSense, an intelligent home-based IAQ sensing system that is able to automatically detect pollution events, identify pollution sources, estimate personal exposure to indoor air pollution, and provide actionable suggestions to help people improve IAQ. We have deployed AirSense at five homes to evaluate its performance and investigate how users interact with it. We demonstrate that AirSense can accurately detect pollution events, identify pollution sources, and forecast IAQ information within five minutes in both controlled and real-world settings. We further show the great potential of AirSense in increasing users' awareness of IAQ and helping them better manage IAQ at their homes.