Monitoring the environment using sensors on buses

Abstract

As the world population continues to grow, a lot of other things are affected by this growth. For instance, more factories are built to support the mounting needs that come with the growing population. Likewise, this emergent population also constitutes to an increase in the number of transportation vehicles on the road which leads to the growing concern of issues like air pollution that is detrimental to people’s health. This leads to the rising importance of air monitoring. Countries around the world, including Singapore, have numerous monitoring stations within the country itself to constantly keep an eye on its air condition. However, given the immobile nature of these monitoring stations, there is a limit to the amount of area that they can cover. As a result, it is virtually impossible to provide total monitoring coverage around the island. Thus, it is essential to delve further for more versatile alternatives to the monitoring stations, such as the use of mobile monitoring device to cover areas that fall outside the range of stationary monitoring stations. Attaching a monitoring node to a bus is one of the most favorable options due to the widespread bus network around the island. This mobile method comprehensively covers a lot more areas than its stationary counterparts. However, these portable monitoring nodes alone are not sufficient by themselves and hence a system needs to be in place for it to function accurately. Therefore, in this report, the design of a monitoring system that consists of a database and a server will be discussed further, together with the actual implementation of a web page that is able to display the results as well as the data collected.