A WSN for ground-level ozone monitoring based on plant electrical activity analysis

This paper describes an innovative monitoring technology that is used to detect ground-level ozone pollution and is based on the deployment of a network of wireless devices which are connected to a collection of plants and are used as biosensors. Such devices retrieve and transmit the electrical activity signals, which are generated within the plants, and use them to monitor environmental conditions. The distributed plants act as wireless sensors which communicate with a weather station, that equipped with meteorological sensors as well as data logging and both wireless and wired communication capabilities. A back end server collects and analyzes the real-time data from the station and delivers environmental and ozone pollution information to the users through a web portal. In order classify the level of ozone exposure, a correlation-based approach has been used. A pilot system has been implemented with a sensing infrastructure that is composed of four plants and started operating in November 2014. As the data collection volume increases, more accurate classification techniques can be adopted.