Environmental hazards for human health: a radon measurement IoT-enabled platform

The radon concentration in the air is a crucial quantity to monitor because of its threats to human life, as its being a carcinogenic agent to humans according to 2012 pronunciation by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. To accurately analyze radon measurements, it is generally desirable to have joint temperature and humidity indications that can compose a full indication of the environmental state and provide an eventual compensation of the raw measurements by means of correction factors experimentally inferred, especially concerning humidity effects. To this aim, an integrated platform able to retrieve all cited measurements has been developed and characterized. While temperature and humidity measurement characterizations have been carried out by means of a reference climatic chamber, the radon concentration values have been compared with a commercial all-in-one calibrated platform. The developed system has also been network-enabled, providing it with an IoT typical data transfer capability, as the MQTT protocol, under Wi-Fi and cellular data communication hardware infrastructures. The obtained results, in terms of mean error with respect to the commercial platform, quantified in about 31 Bq/m3, comparable to the uncertainty of the developed platform, prove the suitability of the developed platform for being employed as a low cost, low power radon monitoring station. The developed platform can be used both for standalone applications and for geographically distributed monitoring centers.