Design, fabrication, and calibration of the Building EnVironment and Occupancy (BEVO) Beacon: A rapidly-deployable and affordable indoor environmental quality monitor

Hagen Fritz, Sepehr Bastami, Calvin Lin, Kingsley Nweye, Tung To, Lauren Chen, Dung Le, Angelina Ibarra, Wendy Zhang, June Young Park, William Waites, Mengjia Tang, Pawel Misztal, Atila Novoselac, Edison Thomaz, Kerry Kinney, Zoltan Nagy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring is essential to assess occupant exposure to the wide range of pollutants present in indoor environments. Accurate research-grade monitors are often used to monitor IAQ but the expense and logistics associated with these devices often limits the temporal and spatial scale of monitoring efforts. More affordable consumer-grade sensors – frequently referred to as low-cost sensors – can provide insight into IAQ conditions across greater scales but their accuracy and calibration requirements need further evaluation. In this paper, we present the Building EnVironment and Occupancy (BEVO) Beacon. The BEVO Beacon is entirely open-source, including the software, hardware, and design schematics which are all provided on GitHub. We created 20 of these standalone, stationary devices which measure up to 24 parameters at a one-minute resolution of which we focus on carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, total volatile organic compounds, temperature, and size-resolved particulate matter. We investigated the efficacy of two different calibration approaches – device-specific and environment-averaged – for these sensors as well as also provide an extensive discussion considerations for each of the sensors. Calibrated sensors performed well when compared to reference monitors or calibrated gas standards. The CO sensors yielded the best agreement (r2=0.98-0.99), followed by temperature (r2=0.89-0.99), CO2 (r2=0.62-0.99), and PM2.5 (r2=-0.13-0.91). In all cases, the device-specific calibration approach yielded the most accurate results. We evaluated our devices through a successful 11-week field study where we monitored the IAQ in participants’ bedrooms. The work we present on consumer-grade sensors adds to the existing literature by considering sensor-specific calibration techniques and analysis. The BEVO Beacon adds to the successful line of similarly developed devices by providing an open-source framework that researchers can readily adapt and modify to their own applications.

Original languageEnglish
Article number109432
JournalBuilding and Environment
Volume222
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 15 2022
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This work was supported by Whole Communities—Whole Health , a research grand challenge at the University of Texas at Austin.

FundersFunder number
University of Texas at Austin

    Keywords

    • Field study
    • Indoor air quality
    • Low-cost sensors

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