Key Themes, Trends, and Drivers of Mobile Ambient Air Quality Monitoring: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Mobile ambient air quality monitoring is rapidly changing the current paradigm of air quality monitoring and growing as an important tool to address air quality and climate data gaps across the globe. This review seeks to provide a systematic understanding of the current landscape of advances and applications in this field. We observe a rapidly growing number of air quality studies employing mobile monitoring, with low-cost sensor usage drastically increasing in recent years. A prominent research gap was revealed, highlighting the double burden of severe air pollution and poor air quality monitoring in low- and middle-income regions. Experiment-design-wise, the advances in low-cost monitoring technology show great potential in bridging this gap while bringing unique opportunities for real-time personal exposure, large-scale deployment, and diversified monitoring strategies. The median value of unique observations at the same location in spatial regression studies is ten, which can be used as a rule-of-thumb for future experiment design. Data-analysis-wise, even though data mining techniques have been extensively employed in air quality analysis and modeling, future research can benefit from exploring air quality information from nontabular data, such as images and natural language.