Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Assessing the Accuracy of Air Quality Personal Exposure Monitors

Halah E. Aljofi
* ,
Thomas J. Bannan
* ORCID logo ,
Michael Flynn
,
James Z Evans
,
David O. Topping
,
Emily Matthews
,
Sebastian Diez
ORCID logo ,
Pete M Edwards
,
Hugh Coe
,
Daniel R. Brison
,
Martie Van Tongeren
ORCID logo ,
Edward D. Johnstone
,
Andrew C. Povey
Version 1 : Received: 25 August 2023 / Approved: 28 August 2023 / Online: 29 August 2023 (03:56:50 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Aljofi, H.E.; Bannan, T.J.; Flynn, M.; Evans, J.; Topping, D.; Matthews, E.; Diez, S.; Edwards, P.; Coe, H.; Brison, D.R.; van Tongeren, M.; Johnstone, E.D.; Povey, A. Study of the Suitability of a Personal Exposure Monitor to Assess Air Quality. Atmosphere 2024, 15, 315. Aljofi, H.E.; Bannan, T.J.; Flynn, M.; Evans, J.; Topping, D.; Matthews, E.; Diez, S.; Edwards, P.; Coe, H.; Brison, D.R.; van Tongeren, M.; Johnstone, E.D.; Povey, A. Study of the Suitability of a Personal Exposure Monitor to Assess Air Quality. Atmosphere 2024, 15, 315.

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 Flow2 (PLF) 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 indoor location and two units at 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.

Keywords

personal monitoring tools; air pollution monitoring; air quality monitoring; commercial portable low-cost wearable sensor; portable air quality; field evaluation; public health; performance evaluation

Subject

Public Health and Healthcare, Public, Environmental and Occupational Health

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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