Developing an Open-Source, Low-Cost, Radon Monitoring System

Abstract

[Abstract] The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have declared Radon gas a human carcinogen. Spain has several regions with high radon concentrations, Galicia (northwestern Spain) being one with the highest Radon concentration. In this work, we present the development of an open-source and low-cost radon monitoring and alert system. The system has two parts: devices and the backend. The devices integrate a Radon sensor, capable of measuring Radon levels every 10 min, and several environmental sensors capable of measuring temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and air pollution. The devices send all the information to the backend, which stores it, exposes it in a web interface, and uses the historical data to predict the radon levels for the following hours. If the radon levels are predicted to overpass the threshold in the next hour, the system issues an alert via several channels (email and MQTT) to the configured recipients for the corresponding device, allowing them to take measures to lower the Radon concentration. The results of this work indicate that the system allows the radon levels to be greatly reduced and makes the development of a low cost and open-source radon monitoring system feasible. The system scalability allows a network of sensors to be created that can help mitigate the health hazard that high radon concentrations create.