REAL TIME SMART AIR AND SOUND POLLUTION MONITORING
SYSTEM FOR CITIES
Abstract: Air and sound pollution is a
serious issue these days. The increasing
pollution has adverse effects on the health
of people. So, controlling pollution is a
necessity to ensure better living standards.
The Air and Sound Pollution Monitoring
System proposed in the paper are a method
to curb increasing levels of pollution by
keeping under surveillance the presence
of harmful gases and smoke to detect air
pollution and the level of sound in decibels
to detect sound pollution. This system
works on the methods of IOT which is a
rising technology based on the fusion of
electronics and computer science. The
concept of IOT helps to obtain location-
specific data from sensors distributed
among various remote locations and saves
it in database that can be accessed using a
web application by city authorities who log
into it.
Keywords: Air pollution, sound pollution,
IOT, sensors, monitoring system.
I. Introduction
Air is one of the essential elements of
man’s surroundings. The earth’s
atmosphere is full of air which contains
gases such as Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon
Monoxide and traces of some rare elements.
Humans need an atmosphere of air that is
free from contaminants. This is very crucial
for human life and health. Any change in
the natural composition of air may cause
grave harm to life forms on earth. Air
pollution is the presence of one or more
contaminants in the atmosphere such as
gases in a quantity that can harm humans,
animals and plants. Air pollutants are
measured in Parts per Million (ppm) or
µg/m . Primary pollutants are released
3 application to receive quick responses from
directly into the atmosphere. Secondary
pollutants are produced when the primary
pollutants react with other atmospheric
chemicals. Air quality affects public health.
The effect of air pollution ranges from
difficulty in breathing, coughing,
aggravation of asthma and emphysema.
Sound is a part of day-to-day city lives.
Sound pollution is the propagation of sound
with a harmful impact of the activity of
human or animal life. The sources of
outdoor sound pollution worldwide include
machinery, transport and propagation
systems. Sound pollution can lead to
hypertension, stress, hearing impairment
and sleep disturbance.
The main objective of IOT Air & Sound
Monitoring System is that the Air and
sound pollution is a growing issue these
days. It is necessary to monitor air quality
and keep it under control for a better future
and healthy living for all. Here we propose
an air quality as well as sound pollution
monitoring system that allows us to monitor
and check live air quality as well as sound
pollution in an area through IOT. System
uses air sensors to sense presence of
harmful gases/compounds in the air and
constantly transmits this data. Also, system
keeps measuring sound level and reports it.
The sensors interact with ESP32 module
which processes this data and transmits it
over the application. This allows authorities
to monitor air pollution in different areas
and act against it. Also, authorities can keep
a watch on the noise pollution near schools,
hospitals and no honking areas, and if
system detects air quality and noise issues
it alerts authorities so they can take
measures to control the issue. The alert
messages are sent through a mobile
the system.

II. Review of Literature
The goal of building a smart city is to
improve quality of life by using technology
to improve the efficiency of services and
meet residents’ needs. Information and
Communication Technology allows city
officials to interact directly with the public
to tell what is happening in the city, how the
city is evolving, and how to enable a better
quality of life. A Smart City is one with at
least one initiative addressing one or more
of the following six characteristics: Smart
Governance, Smart People, Smart Living,
Smart Mobility, Smart Economy and Smart
Environment. In this system, an application
was developed that is going to bear a hand
in this campaign. An area that is being
surveyed for estimating how much the area
is affected by pollution. The constituents of
air along with its proportion are calculated
and levels of sound are monitored for
certain areas of a city. The description
about the integrated network architecture
and the interconnecting mechanisms for the
reliable measurement of parameters by
smart sensors and transmission of data via
internet is being presented. The framework
of the monitoring system was based on a
combination of pervasive distributed
sensing units, information system for data
aggregation, and reasoning and context
awareness. The prototype was tested to
generate real-time graphical information .
In this research, a real time monitoring of
three gases along with the measurement of
sound level are simulated in real
environment. Gases that are monitored in
this implementation are Carbon monoxide,
carbon dioxide & Sulphur dioxide. Then
the results are extended to update in an
online database. As the technology
increases, the degree of automation
(minimizing the man power) in almost all
sectors also increases. Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSN) are gaining the ground in
all sectors of life from traffic control to
environmental monitoring. The air
pollution monitoring system contains
sensors to monitor the interested pollution
parameter in environment. The sound
pollution monitoring system includes a
sensor to monitor the levels of sound in an
area.
The main aim of this paper was to design
and implement an efficient monitoring
system through which the required
parameters are monitored remotely using
internet and the data gathered from the
sensors are stored in the cloud and to
project the estimated trend on the web
browser. A solution for monitoring the
noise and CO levels i.e., any parameter
value crossing its threshold value ranges,
for example CO levels in air in an area
exceeding the normal levels etc., in the
environment using wireless embedded
computing system is proposed in this paper.
The embedded system is an integration of
sensor devices, wireless communication
which enables the user to remotely access
the various parameters and store the data in
cloud . The system notifies the user (city
authorities) about the levels of sound and
air pollutants when they cross a certain
threshold so that necessary actions can be
taken to bring pollution under control.
III. Existing System
In today’s world many pollution
monitoring systems are designed by
considering different environmental
parameters. Existing system model is
presented in figure.1 uses Zigbee based
wireless sensor networks to monitor
physical and environmental conditions with
thousands of application in different fields.
The sensor nodes directly communicated
with the moving nodes deployed on the
object of interest which avoided the use of
complex routing algorithm but local
computations are very minimal. RFID is a
means of storing and retrieving data
through electromagnetic transmission to an
RF compatible integrated circuit. It is
basically used to track and label items in
supermarkets and manufactories. There are

two main components of RFID systems:

tags and readers. A tag has an unique
identification (ID) number and a memory
which is used to store additional data such
as manufacturer, product type, and
environmental factors such as temperature,
humidity, etc.. RFID tags can be classified
into three major categories by their power
source: active tags, passive tags, and semi B. MQ135 Gas Sensor
passive (semi-active) tags are embedded or
attached into objects in a typical RFID The MQ-135 gas sensor senses the gases
application. A server is an occurrence of a like ammonia, nitrogen, oxygen, alcohols,
computer program that is used to accept aromatic compounds, sulfides and smoke.
then reply to another program request; The operating voltage of this gas sensor is
called as a client.. To manage network from 2.5V to 5.0V. The MQ-3 gas sensor
resources Servers are used. In the servers, has a lower conductivity to clean the air as
the services or information are provided a gas sensing material. In the atmosphere
through the Internet those are connected we can find polluting gases, but the
through LAN and made available for users conductivity of gas sensor increases as the
via smart phones, web browser or other web concentration of polluting gas increases.
browser devices to make the system more
intelligent, adaptable and efficient.

IV. Proposed System

The proposed system consists of a sound

sensor (M213) and gas sensors like MQ135
and MQ-7. ESP32 is the microcontroller
used to process the data received from the
sensors and send it to the cloud. Ubidots is C. MQ7 Sensor
the IoT platform used to store and display
the data obtained from the sensors. A
The MQ-7 is a Carbon Monoxide (CO)
mobile application is built to notify users
sensor suitable for sensing CO
about the users about the results of the air
concentrations in the air. It can detect CO-
and sound pollution monitoring system.
gas concentrations anywhere from 20 to
2000 ppm. The MQ-7 is a Carbon
A. M213 Sound sensor
Monoxide (CO) sensor suitable for sensing
CO concentrations in the air. It can detect
The sound sensor M213 is used to detect
CO-gas concentrations anywhere from 20
the level of sound. Its accuracy is adjustable to 2000 ppm. Its operating voltage is 3.3V
according to the requirements of the user. It
to 5V.
combines a microphone and processing
circuitry to provide audio output, binary
indication of the presence of sound and an
analog representation of the amplitude of
sound. The operating voltage of this sensor
is 3.3V to 5V.
D. ESP32 Microcontroller
ESP32 is a series of low-cost, low-
power system on chip microcontroller with
integrated Wi-Fi and dual-mode Bluetooth.
The ESP32 series employs a Tensilica
Xtensa LX6 microprocessor in both dual-
core and single-core variations and includes
in-built antenna switches, RF balun, power
amplifier, low-noise receive amplifier,
filters, and power-management modules.
V. Working of the Project
The system that we are proposing is one
that monitors all the parameters that are
important for a human to achieve a
perfectly healthy lifestyle.The parameters
we are dealing with are various gases and
dust present in an area along with the levels
of sound in it. The respective sensors are
being utilized for acquisition of the required
data to be monitored. The MQ135 gas
sensor senses the gases like CO2, ammonia
nitrogen, oxygen, alcohols, aromatic
compounds, sulfide and smoke. The M213
sound sensor is used to detect the presence
of sound and state its amplitude. The MQ7
Carbon Monoxide sensor is monitors levels
of Carbon Monoxide in the air. These
sensors are connected to ESP32 through a
breadboard with a 3.3Volts regulator, I2C
level shifter. Both the sound sensors and
gas sensors gather data and send it to micro-
controller where it is processed and
transmitted to the cloud. We begin by
flashing the ESP32 module using the
software then using the Attention
Commands it is set in the Wi-Fi mode and
then it is connected to a mobile hotspot or a
Wi-Fi, which finally connects our micro-
controller to the Wi-Fi. The whole
processing required is done by the
processor in it. As the micro-controller
connects to the network, it starts sending
the sensor data to the Ubidots, an IoT
platform that empowers innovators and
industries to prototype and scale IoT
projects to production. It enables us to
configure actions and alerts based on real-
time data. Ubidots offers an API that allows
the user to read and write data to the
resources available: data sources, variables,
values, events and insights. Ubidots also
provides the user with an interface with
which the user can access the data and
monitor it depending on the requirement.
The Ubidots platform will then be
responsible for sending notifications to the
user of the system so that the user knows
when to take action against increase of
pollution.
VI. Results References

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And it is implemented using the latest • www.components101.com/sensors/
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