ECO4RUPA: 5G-IoT inclusive and intelligent routing ecosystem with low-cost air quality monitoring

The increase and diversity of low-cost air quality (AQ) sensors, as well as their flexibility and low power consumption, offers us the opportunity to integrate them into broad AQ wireless sensor networks, with the aim of enabling real-time monitoring and higher spatial sampling density of pollution in all parts of cities. Considering that the vast majority of the population lives in cities and the increase in respiratory/allergic problems in a large part of the population, it is of great interest to offer services and applications to improve their quality of life by avoiding pollution exposure in their movements in the open air. In the ECO4RUPA project, we focus on this kind of service, proposing an inclusive and intelligent routing ecosystem carried out using a network of low-cost AQ sensors with the support of 5G communications along with official AQ monitoring stations, using spatial interpolation techniques to enhance its spatial resolution. The goal of this service is to calculate healthy walking and/or cycling routes according to the particular citizen’s profile and needs. We provide and analyse the results of the proposed route planner under different scenarios (different timetables, congestion road traffic, and routes) and different user profiles, with a special interest in citizens with asthma and pregnant women, since both have special needs. In summary, our approach can lead to an approximately average reduction in pollution exposure of 17.82% while experiencing an approximately average increase in distance travelled of 9.8%.