Low-Cost Sensing for Environmental Sustainability

Monitoring, understand, and being aware of pollutants is a key step in improving environmental sustainability, one of the grand challenges of our time. We contribute by presenting how low-cost sensing improves our understanding and awareness of environmental pollution by increasing coverage and resolution of available information, paving the way toward solutions that improve environmental sustainability. We first present a high-level vision of how pervasive sensing can capture information of wide range of pollutants and challenges encountered in our research. We then highlight the potential of low-cost sensing to address environmental sustainability and challenges in adopting low-cost sensing through three use cases drawn from our existing and ongoing research, including littering, urban air quality, and marine plastics. We also reflect on key research issues for low-cost sensing and future directions with the dual aim of highlighting an important emerging research area and paving the way toward future research in this field.