Projects per year
Abstract
Low-cost personal exposure monitors (PEMs) to measure personal exposure to air pollution are potentially promising tools for health research. However, their adoption requires robust validation. This study evaluated the performance of twenty-one Plume Lab Flow2s (PLFs) by comparing its air pollutant measurements, particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5), 10 μm or less (PM10), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), against several high-quality air pollution monitors under field conditions (at indoor, outdoor, and roadside locations). Correlation and regression analysis were used to evaluate measurements obtained by different PLFs against reference instrumentation. For all measured pollutants, the overall correlation coefficient between the PLFs and the reference instruments was often weak (r < 0.4). Moderate correlation was observed for one PLF unit at the indoor location and two units at the roadside location when measuring PM2.5, but not for PM10 and NO2 concentration. During periods of particularly higher pollution, 11 PLF tools showed stronger regression results (R2 values > 0.5) with one-hour and 9 PLF units with one-minute time interval. Results show that the PLF cannot be used robustly to determine high and low exposure to poor air. Therefore, the use of PLFs in research studies should be approached with caution if data quality is important to the research outputs.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 315 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Atmosphere |
Volume | 15 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2 Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was partially funded by the Saudi Arabia Cultural Bureau in London. The funder had no role in either the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or the decision to publish the study. The University of Manchester Air Quality Supersite was funded through NERC Capital Investment and its running costs are currently supported through the UKRI Clean Air programme grant. Intercomparison infrastructure at the Supersite was funded by OSCA (NE/T001984/1). The equipment used here was provided by the EPSRC project, Manchester Urban Observatory (EP/P016782/1). T.J.B, M.v.T, E.D.J and A.P were, in part, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council funded grant “Relating Environment-use Scenarios in Pregnancy/Infanthood and Resulting airborne-material Exposures to child-health outcomes (RESPIRE)” (NE/W0022641).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 by the authors.
Keywords
- air pollution monitoring
- air quality monitoring
- commercial portable low-cost wearable sensor
- field evaluation
- performance evaluation
- personal monitoring tools
- portable air quality
- public health
Projects
- 1 Finished
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Quantification of Utility of Atmospheric Network Technologies (QUANT)
Edwards, P. (Principal investigator)
NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL
13/02/19 → 12/02/23
Project: Research project (funded) › Research