Abstract:
The majority of the population in low-and middle-income countries uses mainly public transport in day to day activities. For instance, in Kigali (Rwanda) public buses are the main means of transport since they are affordable compared to other transport means such as private cars, motorbikes, and cabs. Those buses are often overcrowded with more than 60 passengers each and this may lead to transfer of communicable diseases such tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases and also causes fatigue. These diseases cannot be known and avoided unless there is a monitoring system in place to identify the pollution in air causing these communicable diseases. This research is intended to develop an IoT-based air quality monitoring system, the Internet of Things is used to monitor air quality in public transport by the use of environmental sensors and low cost microcontroller to collect data and send it to an open source-Internet of things cloud platform for analysis, storage and visualizations. The methodology used in this study is experimental where prototype is developed to collect the data and secondary data from existing studies and reports on air quality is used to make decision. The system incorporates different sensors to measure air quality variables such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, temperature and humidity and transmits data to the Web server via Wi-Fi for storage, analysis, and data visualization for decision makers. The data was further analyzed using other tools such as Grafana and Microsoft excel. The expected results from the study are a customized dashboard showing real time values of variables collected using prototype developed in a graph.
