5 Applications and Study Cases
5.3 Smart environment

The environment needs smart ways and new technologies for monitoring and management. Monitoring the environment is important in order to assess the current condition of the environment to take the correct life decision according to collected data from monitoring systems, and management is needed to have an efficient consumption of resources and use in addition to decrease waste from factories and vehicles [14].

All collected data from monitoring systems are essential to force municipalities and public institutions to protect people and environment, and to mitigate or to avoid natural disasters that might occur.

Smart environment sensors provide many facilities and solutions for many environmental applications such as water and air pollution, weather and radiation monitoring, waste management, natural disasters, and many other environment indicators as shown in Table 6. Smart environment sensors integration with IoT technology is developed for tracking, sensing and monitoring objects of environment which provide potential benefits to achieve a green world and sustainable life [14].

Applications in smart environment can be divided into two main categories: environmental resources management and environmental quality and protection management. Environmental resources management relates to all natural resources such as forests, animals, coal, petroleum, water, air, sunlight, wind, gold, silver, iron and many others. These resources can be seriously affected by pollution, waste and abuse. IoT technologies provide an effective means of communicating among resources sensors and monitoring centers to take appropriate decisions in the consumption of these resources. Thus, for example, air quality can be monitored by using a set of remote sensors across the city, and as a result, we can get a full-time map with pollution levels and better manage the urban traffic of the city. Also, decisions on water usage and treatment can be taken if levels of pollution are known.

There are many other applications that can be implemented by using smart sensors wirelessly connected to a management center. To cite just two more examples, an IoT sensor network can continuous monitor radiation levels around nuclear power plants for prevention, or provide a high resolution and accurate weather forecast map of the region.

Table 6 - Smart environment applications

Application

Description

Forest fire detection

Monitoring of combustion gases and preemptive fire conditions to define alert zones.

Air pollution

Control of toxic gases (CO2, O3, NO2, CO, CH4, …) emitted by factories, farms and cars.

Snow level monitoring

Snow level measurement to know in real time the quality of ski tracks and allow security corps avalanche prevention.

River floods

Monitoring of water level variations in rivers, dams and reservois.

Landslide and avalanche prevention

Monitoring of soil moisture, vibrations and earth density to detect dangerous patterns in land conditions.

Natural disaster early detection

Distributed control in specific places of tremors, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, floods, … to reduce the impact of natural disasters.

Ultraviolet radiation

Measurement of UV sun rays to warm people not to be exposed in certain hours.

Waste Management

Real time detection and control of industrial pollution (waste chemicals and others) to improve environment

Pollution levels in the sea

Control realtime leakages and wastes in the sea

Chemical leakage detection in rivers

Detection of leakages and wastes of factories in rivers.

Help Protect Wildlife

To use GPS tracking collars to locate and track wild animals and communicate their coordinates to researches.