Calibrating low-cost sensors for ambient air monitoring: Techniques, trends, and challenges

Low-cost sensors (LCSs) are widely acknowledged for bringing a paradigm shift in supplemental traditional air monitoring by air regulatory agencies. However, there is concern regarding its data quality and performance stability, which has greatly restricted its large-scale applications. Knowing the recent techniques, progress, and challenges of LCS calibration is of immense significance to promote the field of environmental monitoring. By summarizing the published evidence, this review shows that the global sensor market is rapidly expanding due to the surging needs, but the calibration efforts have been focused on a limited selection of sensors. Relative humidity correction, regression, and machine learning are the three mainstream calibration techniques. Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a feature of the latest research tendency is machine learning. The duration of calibration is largely neglected in the experiment design, but it is found to affect the performance of different calibration methods, especially those that are data-driven. Geographically, China and the United States gained the most research attention in the sensor calibration field, but the spatial mismatch between particulate matter hotspots and calibration sites is quite evident for the rest of the world. Incomplete and unevenly distributed research footprints could limit the large-scale test of method generalizability, as well as diminish the monitoring capacity in underserved areas that suffer greater environmental justice crises. In general, model performance is enhanced by including the key influencing factors, but the degree of improvement is not evidently related to the number of explanatory variables. Overall, studies prove the critical importance of field calibration before sensor deployment, but more studies are needed to establish experiment protocols that can be customized to specific needs.