Abstract
Ambient gas measurement is essential in diverse fields and applications, from preventing accidents, to air pollution warnings, and granting the correct gas mixture to patients in hospitals. Gas leakage can reach large proportions, affecting neighborhoods or even cities, causing enormous environmental impacts. The integration of gas sensors through the Internet of things (IoT) paradigm should ease the information collecting and sharing processes, granting better experiences to users, and avoiding major losses and expenses. With this integration, final users must be capable of operating these gadgets without previous technological knowledge, thus, the proposal of plug-and-play (PnP) sensors and actuators should be considered. This article proposes an IoT-based solution for sensing environmental gases preceding a PnP approach, combining the hardware and software integrations for a better user experience. In this proposal, the PnP interface is defined, using the universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter protocol. The wireless communication is made through the IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standards. The proposed sensor is capable of detecting smoke, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, alcohol vapor, liquefied petroleum gas, benzene, ammonia, methane, and propane. The solution is integrated with a middleware for IoT, called In.IoT, a software that receives the sensed data, stores, and forward them to other smart devices on the same context, allowing an Android-based mobile application to warn users regarding the environmental gases concentrations. The proposed solution is experimented, demonstrated, validated, and it is ready for use.