Enhancing Low-Cost Air Quality Sensors with AI for Smart Green Routing
Laura Po, Martina Casari, Federica Rollo, Matteo Angelinelli, Giorgio Pedrazzi, Chiara De Pascali, Luca Nunzio Francioso, Roberta Turra
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2025F3919
Citation: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS), M. Bolanowski, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, D. Ślęzak (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 43, pages 369–374 (2025)
Abstract. Urban air pollution poses significant health risks, especially in densely populated areas. Low-cost air quality sensors offer a scalable solution for high-resolution environmental monitoring, but their limited accuracy undermines their reliability. Moreover, navigation systems that aim to reduce human exposure to pollution require trustworthy, real-time AQ data to be effective. This paper presents the AIQS project (AI-enhanced air quality sensor for optimizing green routes), an ongoing initiative that combines artificial intelligence, sensor hardware optimization, and pedestrian routing innovation to address these challenges. AIQS applies machine learning techniques---including Multilayer Perceptrons and fuzzy logic---to correct sensor readings and integrates these improvements into the open-source MitH framework. In parallel, hardware-level optimizations, such as fluid dynamics simulations and pre-treatment modules, are explored to enhance sensor performance. The corrected AQ data is then incorporated into a configurable routing tool capable of estimating pollutant exposure and computing low-exposure pedestrian paths in urban environments. This paper reports on the methodologies adopted, initial implementation outcomes, and planned next steps, offering insights into the design of AI-driven, pollution-aware navigation systems for healthier and more sustainable cities.
References
- 1] W. H. Organization, “Ambient air pollution: A global assessment of exposure and burden of disease,” https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241511353, 2018.
- B. Alfano et al., “A review of low-cost particulate matter sensors from the developers’ perspectives,” Sensors, vol. 20, no. 23, p. 6819, 2020.
- A. Molnár et al., “Aerosol hygroscopicity: Hygroscopic growth proxy based on visibility for low-cost pm monitoring,” Atmospheric Research, vol. 236, 2020.
- M. Casari, L. Po, and L. Zini, “Airmlp: A multilayer perceptron neural network for temporal correction of pm2.5 values in turin,” Sensors, vol. 23, no. 23, p. 9446, 2023.
- M. Casari and L. Po, “Mith: A framework for mitigating hygroscopicity in low-cost pm sensors,” Environmental Modelling & Software, vol. 173, p. 105955, 2024.
- S. Mahajan et al., “Car: The clean air routing algorithm for path navigation with minimal pm2.5 exposure on the move,” IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 147 373–147 382, 2019.
- T. Desai et al., “Comparative analysis of machine learning algorithms for air quality index prediction,” in Machine Learning for Computational Science and Engineering, 2025.
- P. Zhivkov, “Optimization and evaluation of calibration for low-cost air quality sensors: Supervised and unsupervised machine learning models,” Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, vol. 25, pp. 255–258, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.15439/2021F95
- F. Rollo, B. Sudharsan, L. Po, and J. G. Breslin, “Air quality sensor network data acquisition, cleaning, visualization, and analytics: A real-world iot use case,” in UbiComp/ISWC ’21: 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and 2021 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Virtual Event, September 21-25, 2021, A. Doryab, Q. Lv, and M. Beigl, Eds. ACM, 2021, pp. 67–68. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3460418.3479277
- M. Arsov, E. Zdravevski, P. Lameski, R. Corizzo, N. Koteli, K. Mitreski, and V. Trajkovik, “Short-term air pollution forecasting based on environmental factors and deep learning models,” in Proceedings of the 2020 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS 2020, Sofia, Bulgaria, September 6-9, 2020, ser. Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. A. Maciaszek, and M. Paprzycki, Eds., vol. 21, 2020, pp. 15–22. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.15439/2020F211
- B. Cengiz et al., “A survey on data fusion approaches in IoT-based smart cities: Smart applications, taxonomies, challenges, and future research directions,” Information Fusion, vol. 121, 2025.
- R. Sinnott and S. Zhong, “Real-time route planning to reduce pedestrian pollution exposure in urban settings,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 10th International Conference on Big Data Computing, 2023, pp. 1–10. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3632366.3632381
- F. Bistaffa and P. C. Oliveira, “Green routes in barcelona: A pedestrian routing prototype to reduce air pollution exposure,” https://filippobistaffa.github.io/papers/2025greenroutes.pdf, 2025, accessed on May 27, 2025.
- C. Bachechi, F. Desimoni, L. Po, and D. M. Casas, “Visual analytics for spatio-temporal air quality data,” in 24th International Conference on Information Visualisation, IV 2020, Melbourne, Australia, September 7-11, 2020, E. B. et. al., Ed. IEEE, 2020, pp. 460–466. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1109/IV51561.2020.00080
- M. Casari and E. Montorsi, “Martinacasari/airqualitydatasetsrepository: Aqdr - v1.0.0 (v1.0.0),” Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13982208, 2024.
- M. Casari, P. A. Kowalski, and L. Po, “Optimisation of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for adjusting low-cost sensors pm concentrations,” Ecological Informatics, vol. 83, p. 102781, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954124003236
- M. Casari, L. Po, and L. Zini, “Airmlp: A multilayer perceptron neural network for temporal correction of pm2.5 values in turin,” Sensors, vol. 23, no. 23, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/23/9446
- A. Das, W. Kong, R. Sen, and Y. Zhou, “A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting,” 2024. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10688
- V. Ekambaram, A. Jati, P. Dayama, S. Mukherjee, N. H. Nguyen, W. M. Gifford, C. Reddy, and J. Kalagnanam, “Tiny time mixers (ttms): Fast pre-trained models for enhanced zero/few-shot forecasting of multivariate time series,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, A. Globerson, L. Mackey, D. Belgrave, A. Fan, U. Paquet, J. Tomczak, and C. Zhang, Eds., vol. 37. Curran Associates, Inc., 2024, pp. 74 147–74 181. [Online]. Available: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/file/874a4d89f2d04b4bcf9a2c19545cf040-Paper-Conference.pdf