Towards occupational health improvement in foundries through dense dust and pollution monitoring using a complementary approach with mobile and stationary sensing nodes

In industrial environments, such as metallurgic facilities, human operators are exposed to harsh conditions where ambient air is often polluted with quartz, dust, lead debris and toxic fumes. Constant exposure to respirable particles can cause irreversible health damages and thus it is of high interest for occupational health experts to monitor the air quality on a regular basis. However, current monitoring procedures are carried out sparsely, with data collected in single day campaigns limited to few measurement locations. In this paper we explore the use and present first experimental results of a novel heterogeneous approach that uses a mobile robot and a network of low cost sensing nodes. The proposed system aims to address the spatial and temporal limitations of current monitoring techniques. The mobile robot, along with standard localization and mapping algorithms, allows to produce short term, spatially dense representations of the environment where dust, gas, ambient temperature and airflow information can be modelled. The sensing nodes on the other hand, can collect temporally dense (and usually spatially sparse) information during long periods of time, allowing in this way to register for example, daily variations in the pollution levels. Using data collected with the proposed system in an steel foundry, we show that a heterogeneous approach provides dense spatio-temporal information that can be used to improve the working conditions in industrial facilities.