EDIAQI measures indoor air quality in Zagreb

Leipzig, 19.09.2025 – Jan-David Förster

AQBIE – Air Quality Beacon & Immission Evaluator – provides data on indoor air quality.

This week, Andrea Cuesta and I from Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), together with Goran Gajski and Marko Gerić from Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health, successfully deployed 14 indoor air quality sensors in the beautiful city of Zagreb as part of the EU Horizon project EDIAQI EU (Evidence driven indoor air quality improvement).

Over the next two months, these devices will remain unattended in households, helping us capture high-resolution data on the personal exposure of children to air pollution and the sources of indoor pollutants.

Our device, called AQBIE - Air Quality Beacon & Immission Evaluator - is a mature sensor platform equipped with particulate matter and other environmental sensors from Alphasense, Sensirion, and Bosch Sensortec GmbH. Together, they provide new insights into aerosol size distribution and pollutants in indoor environments.

After more than six months of development and countless hours of debugging hardware and software, it’s incredibly rewarding to see AQBIE running in the field. This instrument development project has been the most complex I’ve worked on so far. Unlike the usual "one working prototype is enough" attitude in research, here I had to design, build, test, and deploy many devices, which came with a whole new set of challenges. Along the way, I grew a full-stack developer, taking on electrical design, mechanical engineering, and software programming all at once.

AQBIE was recently mentioned by me in an EDIAQI webinar on low-cost sensors, which you can watch here: https://lnkd.in/eT29KVwE

Jan-David Förster

AQBIE - Air Quality Beacon & Immission Evaluator - is a mature sensor platform equipped with particulate matter and other environmental sensors from Alphasense, Sensirion, and Bosch Sensortec GmbH. Together, they provide new insights into aerosol size distribution and pollutants in indoor environments. Photo: Jan-David Förster, TROPOS

Andrea Cuesta & Jan-David Förster (TROPOS), Goran Gajski & Marko Gerić (Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health, IMI). Photo: EDIAQI