Early Warning Systems for COVID-19 Infections Based on Low-Cost Indoor Air-Quality Sensors and LPWANs

Abstract

During the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc in many areas of the world, as the infection spreads through person-to-person contact. Transmission and prognosis, once infected, are potentially influenced by many factors, including indoor air pollution. Particulate Matter (PM) is a complex mixture of solid and/or liquid particles suspended in the air that can vary in size, shape, and composition and recent scientific work correlate this index with a considerable risk of COVID-19 infections. Early Warning Systems (EWS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have given rise to the development of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) based on sensors, which measure PM levels and monitor In-door Air pollution Quality (IAQ) in real-time. This article proposes an open-source platform architecture and presents the development of a Long Range (LoRa) based sensor network for IAQ and PM measurement. A few air quality sensors were tested, a network platform was implemented after simulating setup topologies, emphasizing feasible low-cost open platform architecture.