Students’ Dust Monitor brings sensor data to technical facility maintenance

When does an electrical cabinet or equipment room need cleaning? Dust Monitor, developed by a student team on an IoT project course, uses sensor measurements to help identify maintenance needs.

The idea emerged through collaboration with companies in the Efficiency, Productivity and Competitiveness through Data project. The aim was to explore how maintenance of technical facilities could move from scheduled inspections and responding to problems towards maintenance based on measured needs.

The students built a prototype that measures airborne dust particles, temperature and relative humidity. The device transmits the measurements wirelessly via a LoRa connection to a cloud service, where users can view the data in a browser. Threshold-based alerts can help identify maintenance needs early.

Measurement data could enable more targeted maintenance visits, reduce unnecessary inspections and support reliable equipment operation. The project also compared different cloud solutions and their costs.

The project produced a technical prototype. The next step is testing in real operating environments to verify measurement reliability, wireless connectivity and practical benefits.

View the students’ Dust Monitor presentation (PDF, in Finnish)