Abstract
Cities around the world are struggling with environmental pollution. The
conventional monitoring approaches are not effective for undertaking
large-scale environmental monitoring due to logistical and cost-related
issues. The availability of low-cost and low-power Internet of Things
(IoT) devices has proved to be an effective alternative to monitor the
ambient environment. Such systems have opened up environment monitoring
opportunities to researchers and citizens while simultaneously
confronting them with challenges like sensor accuracy, accumulation of
large data sets, and data analysis, which itself is a formidable task
that requires extensive computational resources and technical expertise.
To address this challenge, a social, open-source, and citizen-centric
IoT (Soc-IoT) framework is proposed that combines tools for real-time
environmental sensing with an intuitive data analysis and visualization
application. Soc-IoT has two main components: (1) CoSense Unit – a
resource-efficient, portable and modular environment monitoring device
intended for citizen sensing and complementing official environment
monitoring infrastructure, and (2) exploreR – an intuitive
cross-platform data analysis and visualization application that offers a
comprehensive set of tools for systematic analysis of sensor data
without any coding requirement. Developed as a proof-of-concept
framework to monitor the environment at scale, Soc-IoT aims to promote
environmental resilience and open innovation by reducing technological
barriers.