Air pollution is a major global health crisis. It is responsible for an estimated seven million deaths each year and severely impacts the health of millions more. Every minute, a child dies from an illness linked to air pollution, and ten adults lose their lives due to prolonged exposure to polluted air. Alarmingly, 92% of the world’s population lives in areas where air quality exceeds safe exposure limits. Nevertheless, air pollution monitoring remains limited across much of the globe. Current solutions rely on deploying millions of sensors over large areas, which is a costly approach that has not been widely implemented. This underscores the urgent need for innovative, scalable monitoring technologies.
Our project addresses this need by pioneering a new air quality monitoring paradigm that uses 5G and beyond massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. These antennas can be equipped with sensing materials designed to detect multiple pollutants simultaneously. By deploying customized sensing materials on the antenna element surfaces—each targeting a specific pollutant—using a composite material of a molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) and a highly conductive two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterial, we successfully add sensing capabilities to MIMO antennas without compromising their primary wireless communication functions. This concept can also be extended to detect other environmental threats, including hazardous biochemical agents, airborne bacteria and viruses, and fluid-borne analytes.
Massive MIMO is poised to become a standard feature in future cellular networks, with widespread deployment expected in the coming years. The results of our project provide a framework for large-scale, high-resolution air quality monitoring utilizing existing antenna infrastructure, eliminating the need for millions of standalone sensors and revolutionizing how air quality is tracked worldwide.
The interdisciplinary approach used in the project generated significant advancements in knowledge and laid the theoretical foundation for MIMO-based air quality monitoring, an entirely new application of antenna infrastructure. In the short term, this will create new opportunities for sensing technologies and encourage further research and innovation. In the long term, the project's results will influence the design of future MIMO antenna systems by integrating wireless commination functionality with advanced sensing capabilities.
The interdisciplinary approach of the project advanced knowledge at the intersection of materials science and radio frequency (RF) engineering, creating the theoretical foundation needed to develop massive MIMO-based air quality monitoring for the first time. In the short term, these results will pave the way for new sensing techniques and inspire other research and innovation endeavors. It enables cost-effective, large-scale, distributed air quality monitoring in different environments (outdoor and indoor). We have achieved sensing sensitivity of gas molecules down to parts-per-million (ppm) concentration levels. This will be a game changer, leading to new opportunities for value creation and upgrading the functionality of antenna infrastructure to include air quality monitoring. In the long term, the results will influence the design of future massive MIMO antenna systems with dual functionality and additional sensing capability. This project has positioned our research team at the forefront of air quality monitoring technologies and enabled outstanding international research opportunities that could lead to global breakthrough innovations.
This project explores a new air quality monitoring paradigm utilizing the fifth generation (5G) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna infrastructure to simultaneously sense multiple pollutants using novel sensing materials deployed on the antenna surfaces. The idea is to deploy case-tailored sensing nanomaterials on the antenna element surfaces with each targeting a specific analyte using a Molecular Imprinting Polymer (MIP) layer grown above a highly conductive 2D transduction nanomaterial layer. The MIP functionalized transduction nanomaterial over the antenna surface could act as tunable impedance with the impedance value determined by the presence of the target molecules. Sensing is done by monitoring the changes in the impedances between the antenna elements and the load termination in the adaptive impedance matching network. The proposed concept could enable massive MIMO antenna system with an additional sensing functionality without affecting its primary functionalities. By properly designing the physico-chemical composition of the sensing materials, the impedance can be made to respond in a specific way to target pollutants concentrations, which can be decoupled from other mismatch sources using machine learning techniques. The approach is applicable for any multi-antenna system where the antenna elements (same or all) can be functionalized to target a specific pollutant.
The ambition is to create a new generation of dual functionality massive MIMO antenna system that is used not only for wireless operations, but also have a secondary functionality of multi-pollutant sensing. The concept can also be extended to apply for other environmental analytes such as hazardous chemical/biological agents, airborne bacteria and viruses as well as for fluidic analytes (utilizing microfluidics). If successful, the project will revolutionize air quality monitoring enabling a cost-effective sensing of multiple pollutants using massive MIMO antenna systems.
