Mobile IoT-Based System for Urban Air Quality Spatial Mapping Using Bicycle-Mounted Sensor Platform
Ichsan Hardyanto(a), Husin Alatas(b), Irzaman (c*)

(a) PT. Has Environmental
(b) Theoretical Physics Division, Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia
(c) Applied Physics Division, Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia
* irzaman[at]apps.ipb.ac.id

Abstract

Urban air quality monitoring based on fixed stations provides limited spatial resolution, failing to capture intra-urban pollution gradients driven by traffic dynamics, land use variation, and local meteorological conditions. This study presents the development and field deployment of a mobile, low-cost air quality monitoring system designed for georeferenced spatial mapping of CO2, PM2.5, and PM10 concentrations in urban environments. The system integrates a Winsen ZH19 NDIR CO2 sensor, Nova SDS011 optical particle counter, GPS module, and BME280 meteorological sensor (temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure), controlled by an ESP32 microcontroller with real-time data transmission via WiFi to a self-hosted Grafana dashboard. The device was mounted on a bicycle and deployed across multiple transect routes covering diverse urban zones including commercial, residential, and high-traffic areas in Bogor City, Indonesia, with measurements conducted across varying times of day to capture diurnal pollution patterns. The bicycle-mounted platform enables flexible, low-cost spatial data acquisition without the infrastructural constraints of fixed monitoring stations, offering a complementary approach to national air quality index (ISPU) measurements. Multiple repeated transects along overlapping routes were conducted to assess measurement reproducibility and spatial consistency. This work demonstrates the feasibility of bicycle-based mobile sensing as an affordable and scalable methodology for high-resolution urban air quality mapping in Indonesian cities.

Keywords: Mobile air quality monitoring | Urban spatial mapping, Bicycle-mounted sensor, Low-cost IoT sensing, Particulate matter CO2

Topic: Instrumentation and Computational Physics