Are there good sensors for pollen?

I realised that I've never thought about how pollen is tracked.

I keep thinking about creating a weather station to put just outside, maybe connecting it over lorawan and having sensors that pick up this, water level, wind, temperature, all so I can collect it and present it on some kinda dashboard to prepare me for the day ahead, and pollen would be really good to have since I suffer from all sorts of allergies (frankly even picking up dust levels in the house would also be good). However I realise I don't even know where to start!

I wonder if this's mostly a time of year calculation based upon seasons and life cycle of the plants, or is it actually detected in the air?

How do you even differentiate between different pollen in the air? Are/is there particular sensors that're better for this than others? How do you differentiate between pollen and dust? What about pollution levels?

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Gough Lui over 5 years ago

The issue is that most laser particulate monitor sensors just can't know the difference between smoke, dust and pollen. There were attempts to produce sensors that better distinguished pollen by using certain properties like polarization of light or the waveform as it impinges on a beam of light as pollen usually have irregular surface shapes, but so far, these have been very limited and expensive to my knowledge.

Mitsubishi were the only ones I know to have issued a press release about it but I've never been able to obtain the parts. The only commercial one seems to be the PS2 which is sold under a number of brands but seems to be about $2,300 - see https://www.omnicontrols.com/product/ps2-pollen-sensor/ and https://www.shinyei.co.jp/stc/eng/products/optical/ps2.html for example.

- Gough
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Gough Lui over 5 years ago

The issue is that most laser particulate monitor sensors just can't know the difference between smoke, dust and pollen. There were attempts to produce sensors that better distinguished pollen by using certain properties like polarization of light or the waveform as it impinges on a beam of light as pollen usually have irregular surface shapes, but so far, these have been very limited and expensive to my knowledge.

Mitsubishi were the only ones I know to have issued a press release about it but I've never been able to obtain the parts. The only commercial one seems to be the PS2 which is sold under a number of brands but seems to be about $2,300 - see https://www.omnicontrols.com/product/ps2-pollen-sensor/ and https://www.shinyei.co.jp/stc/eng/products/optical/ps2.html for example.

- Gough
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