Scientists develop high-tech tools to tackle indoor pollution

Scientists from the University of Rwanda in Kigali and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, have been developing a digital tool that could help families to monitor indoor air pollution – an innovation that could improve the health and well-being of affected communities as well as contribute to the use of cleaner energy.

Data published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in April 2022, shows that almost the entire global population (99%) breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits, and threatens their health.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, people rely on solid biomass fuels including fuelwood, crop residues or animal dung as a domestic energy source which results in harmful indoor pollutants such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other toxic indoor air compositions.

According to a fact sheet published by the WHO in September 2021, about 2.6 billion people still cook using solid fuels (such as wood, crop wastes, charcoal, coal and dung) and kerosene in open fires and inefficient stoves. Most of these people are poor and live in low- and middle-income countries.

It explains that these cooking practices are inefficient, and use fuels and technologies that produce high levels of household air pollution with a range of health-damaging pollutants, including small soot particles that penetrate deep into the lungs.

In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for fine particles. Exposure is particularly high among women and young children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth.

“Over 3.8 million people a year die prematurely from illness attributable to the household air pollution caused by the inefficient use of solid fuels and kerosene for cooking,” the fact sheet states.

Local community to be trained

It is for this reason, that the University of Rwanda’s Centre of Excellence on Internet of Things (IoT), Embedded Computing Systems in collaboration with a team of scientists from Makerere University is investigating how digital tools could help families monitor indoor air pollution.

With funding from the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology, or PASET, and its Regional Scholarship Innovation Fund (RSIF) grants scheme, the project aims to develop an IoT monitoring device that will help assess levels of indoor air pollution in Sub-Saharan Africa and propose mechanisms to help families implement measures to reduce high levels of indoor air pollution to the WHO’s acceptable levels.

In doing so, the collaborative project will address various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to good health and well-being (SDG3); clean energy (SDG7) and innovation (SDG9).

“The first phase of the project was to develop and test our prototype which is now ready. It can collect indoor information from houses in the rural area and it can upload the indoor air pollutants to our centralised data storage system for further analysis, says Dr Frederic Nzanywayingoma, a senior lecturer in the department information systems at the University of Rwanda.

He says that the project, which began in the year 2020 and will run to 2023, has so far seen the completion of the design of the IoT indoor air pollution prototype and has produced three of the 60 IoT devices to be developed overall.

The tool has been deployed to pilot sites in Rwandan urban communities and can collect the necessary data in the homes and feed it to a centralised monitoring system for data processing.

“The project team is also mentoring five PhD students from the University of Rwanda through training on developing the IoT prototype in addition to participating in various short courses on the embedded systems which have exposed them to different technologies used in IoT prototyping,” adds Nzanywayingoma.

The students are using new tools for data collection and data visualisation. Besides mentoring PhD students, other partners involved in the project have also gained more skills such as backend development for centralised data storage systems.

Through the project, the local community will also be trained on the use of the Indoor IoT monitoring tool for increased indoor air pollution detection.