Joao B. A. Gomes

Ambient gas detection and measurement had become essential in diverse fields and applications, from preventing accidents, avoiding equipment malfunction, to air pollution warnings and granting the correct gas mixture to patients in hospitals. Gas leakage can reach large proportions, affecting entire neighborhoods or even cities, causing enormous environmental impacts. This paper elaborates on a deep review of the state of the art on gas-sensing technologies, analyzing the opportunities and main characteristics of the transducers, as well as towards their integration through the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This should ease the information collecting and sharing processes, granting better experiences to users, and avoiding major losses and expenses. The most promising wireless-based solutions for ambient gas monitoring are analyzed and discussed, open research topics are identified, and lessons learned are shared to conclude the study.

Water is a natural resource essential for sustaining life. Leakages and misuse of this precious resource contributes to the scarcity of water in many regions of the world. Technologies for remotely monitoring water consumption and leakages detection, warning users and allowing the interruption of the water distribution can play a key role to reduce costs and prevent wasting of this precious natural resource. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm can offer a tremendous contribution for this goal. Then, this paper proposes the design, construction, and validation of a smart system for remote monitoring of water consumption, detecting leakages and interruptions on water distribution. It is demonstrated for smart buildings and can easily used in other related environments. The proposed solution followed an IoT-based approach and can easily integrated in an IoT smart solution. It was evaluated, demonstrated, validated, and it is ready for use.

Gas monitoring systems have turned into a key feature in many applications in different fields, such as medicine, industry and environmental monitoring. Accidents involving gas leakage generate massive costs and deaths, where carbon monoxide (CO) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) are the main causes of domestic accidents. They could be avoidable with smart gas sensors integrated with other smart devices through the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This paper focuses on the design and construction of a smart multi-gas plug-and-play sensor to avoid accidents in smart environments involving CO and LPG. This device is ready to connect on an IoT solution. It uses the standard IEEE 802.15.4 to communicate with a border router responsible to make the data available to other devices. The data will be sent to a middleware granting that other smart devices on the same context can access the information and make the correct decisions. The created prototype was evaluated, demonstrated, and validated, and it is ready for use.