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Review
. 2025 Jun 6;25(12):3573.
doi: 10.3390/s25123573.

Secure and Trusted Crowdsensing for Outdoor Air Quality Monitoring: State of the Art and Perspectives

Claudio Marche  1   2 , Emmanuele Massidda  1 , Alessandro Sanna  1 , Gianmarco Angius  1 , Michele Nitti  1   2 , Davide Maiorca  1 , Stefano Lai  1
Affiliations
Review

Secure and Trusted Crowdsensing for Outdoor Air Quality Monitoring: State of the Art and Perspectives

Claudio Marche et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Air pollution is a major problem in the modern world; although it particularly impacts developing countries, which are experiencing fast and often uncontrolled industrialization, its effects constitute a global burden on the environment and health. At the same time, the costs of effective air quality monitoring programs are prohibitive for emerging economies, thus making any correction difficult to assess. Emerging technologies, such as distributed networks of sensors organized in the Internet of Things, are under the lens of scientific and industrial communities as a valuable, low-cost alternative to standard techniques. In this paper, we report a review of current approaches to distributed air quality monitoring. Specifically, we (1) emphasize the role of crowdsensing in leveraging sensor-enabled mobile devices for large-scale environmental data collection and (2) discuss criticalities, open challenges, and future perspectives in enforcing data security when such approaches are deployed in real application scenarios.

Keywords: environment; health; mobile crowdsensing; outdoor air quality monitoring; secure; trusted.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Scenario of a generic MCS system.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Graphical representation of the attack surface.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mockup of an application to collect air quality data. It uses multiple gamification approaches, like streak loss (1), daily tasks (2), friend involvement (3), and rewards (4).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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