Assessment of Urban Indoor Air Quality, Environmental Conditions and Occupancy Using a New Low-Cost Wireless Sensor
Research Assistant Professor Patricia Fabian and Professor Thomas Little, both of Boston University, and Harvard Assistant Professor Gary Adamkiewicz seek to build and test a compact low-cost indoor air quality and occupancy sensing device (Urban Indoor Air Monitor, or iAM) in an ongoing housing field study in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Fabian, Little and Adamkiewicz will install devices in a sample of homes to measure CO and CO2, relative humidity and temperature, and occupancy, and compare measurements produced by the device to those obtained via other data collection methods. If effective, it will reduce indoor air quality and environmental monitoring costs by a factor of ten, when compared to current off the shelf technology. The data collected from this experiment will help inform current and future research, interventions and design intended to reduce health disparities related to indoor environmental air quality.
This pilot will be part of an ongoing study conducted by the Center for Research on Environmental and Social Stressors in Housing across the Life Course (CRESSH) related to environmental health disparities in low income populations throughout Massachusetts.
Professor Fabian teaches in the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Professor Little serves as the Director of the Multimedia Communications Laboratory at Boston University and teaches in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor Adamkiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposure Disparities in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Publications:
“Development of an In-home, Real-time Air Pollutant Sensor Platform and Implications for Community Use.” Environmental Pollution. October 15, 2018.
Fabian, Patricia; Sharon Kitman Lee; Lindsay Underhill; Kimberly Vermeer; Gary Adamkiewicz and Jonathan Levy. Modeling Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) Infiltration in Low-Income Multifamily Housing before and after Building Energy Retrofits. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2016 Mar 16; 13(3).
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