Mapping air quality with a mobile crowdsourced air quality monitoring system (C-AQM)

World cities are currently facing one of the major crisis of the last century. Some preliminary studies on COVID-19 pandemia have shown that air pollutants may have a strong impact on virus effects. Improved gas sensors and wireless communication systems open the door to the design of new air monitoring systems based on citizen science to better monitor and communicate the air quality levels. In this paper, we present the Crowdsourced Air Quality Monitoring (C-AQM) system, which relies on Air Quality Monitoring reference stations and a cluster of new low-cost and low-energy sensor nodes, in order to improve the resolution of air quality maps. The data collected by the C-AQM system is stored in a time series database and is available both to city council managers for decision making and to citizens for informative purposes. In this paper, we present the main bases of the C-AQM system as well as the measurements validation campaign carried out.The authors would like to acknowledge Sabadell city council and their program ”Pressupostos Participatius 2019” for partially funding this work. We would also like to thank ADENC (Associaci´o per a la Defensa i l’Estudi de la Natura de Catalunya) for their support to the project and their unvaluable help in testing site volunteers recruitment. the project is supported by Generalitat de Catalunya under the program Suport als Grups de Recerca Emergents (2017 SGR 820). Last but not least, the authors also would like to thank all the volunteers for the walks and the commitment with the project.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version