An ultra-low-cost integrated paper-based sensing and electronics platform

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Traditional approaches to air quality monitoring involve networks of fixed measurement stations, which requires significant investment. For example, the Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) has 175 sites across the UK. These monitoring stations are often located away from roadsides and major traffic congestion areas, which result in localised high concentrations of pollutants. Sparsely distributed around a city, these stations can provide accurate time-series data, but with limited spatial detail.This makes it highly challenging to determine the spatial distribution of air quality from the measured data, and so modelling approaches are used to calculate distribution of pollutants. Real-time continuous measurements from a large sensor networks would transform the process of determining distributions of pollutants and air quality levels, supporting these modelling approaches, and potentially even making them redundant.Deployment of low-cost sensors in significant numbers will enable detection of pollution hotspots, and will inform real-time pollution mitigation strategies. The technology that BlakBear is developing will enable precisely this.