Study and development of a participative air pollution monitoring system

Air pollution is one of the main threats to humans' health. In Italy, despite the majority of air pollutants are experiencing a descending trend, Particulate Matter (PM) particles are the main cause of air pollution. This thesis work contributes to the development of a smart system capable of gathering and elaborating PM10 and PM2.5 air pollution data: in particular, while measurements are being taken by tiny and portable monitoring devices and stored locally in each device, citizens’ smartphones should act as a bridge towards the Internet for the monitoring devices so that information about air pollution can be sent to a remote server, which will collect data, perform calibration and provide REST APIs to be queried for accessing information. This thesis work focuses on the implementation of a mobile application for both Android and iOS operating systems capable of connecting to a programmable microcontroller via Bluetooth Low Energy technology in order to receive air pollution measurements and send them to the remote server. Moreover, the thesis work dwells on the attention to user interface and user experience, which have been designed from scratch and realized thanks to an innovative cross-platform mobile application framework, developed by Google, called Flutter. Moreover, several optimization tests have been carried out in order to design the best strategy for sending data via BLE, emphasizing the importance of completing each BLE transfer within a reasonable amount of time.