Monitoring and apportioning sources of indoor air quality using low-cost particulate matter sensors

Air quality is one of the most important factors in public health. While outdoor air quality is widely studied, the indoor environment has been less scrutinised, even though time spent indoors is typically much greater than outdoors. The emergence of low-cost sensors can help assess indoor air quality. This study provides a new methodology, utilizing low-cost sensors and source apportionment techniques, to understand the relative importance of indoor and outdoor air pollution sources upon indoor air quality. The methodology is tested with three sensors placed in different rooms inside an exemplar house (bedroom, kitchen and office) and one out-doors. When the family was present, the bedroom had the highest average concentrations for PM2.5 and PM10 (3.9 +/- 6.8 ug/m3 and 9.6 +/- 12.7 mu g/m3 respectively), due to the activities undertaken there and the presence of softer furniture and carpeting. The kitchen, while presenting the lowest PM concentrations for both size ranges (2.8 +/- 5.9 ug/m3 and 4.2 +/- 6.9 mu g/m3 respectively), presented the highest PM spikes, especially during cooking times. Increased ventilation in the office resulted in the highest PM1 concentration (1.6 +/- 1.9 mu g/m3), high-lighting the strong effect of infiltration of outdoor air for the smallest particles. Source apportionment, via positive matrix factorisation (PMF), showed that up to 95 % of the PM1 was found to be of outdoor sources in all the rooms. This effect was reduced as particle size increased, with outdoor sources contributing >65 % of the PM2.5, and up to 50 % of the PM10, depending on the room studied. The new approach to elucidate the con-tributions of different sources to total indoor air pollution exposure, described in this paper, is easily scalable and translatable to different indoor locations.