Aircraft Lavatory Cleanliness Monitoring

Introduction:
The aircraft lavatories are cleaned before take-off, after landing and during flight. The cleanliness process during flight is inconvenient and annoying for few travellers. This is often observed for first class travellers for whom lavatory is often cleaned after every usage.

It is essential to have system which prompts to clean the lavatory when it is very much required. This avoids unnecessary cleaning and improves comfort level of air travellers. Let us discuss the architecture of real-time aircraft lavatory cleanliness monitoring system.

IoT based Aircraft Lavatory Cleanliness monitoring System architecture

➤The system uses two types of sensors viz. one gas sensor and two IR sensors. The gas sensor (such as MQ-05) is used to assess methane level present in the lavatory compartment. Threshold methane level for clean lavatory is identified and used as reference. Out of IR sensors, IR sensor#1 is used for positive feedback by passenger and IR sensor#2 is used for negative feedback by passenger. These IR sensors function as touch sensors here.

Refer Infrared Sensor Basics which describes working of IR sensor.
➤The sensors are connected with NodeMCU (i.e. ESP32) board which houses wifi and BLE (i.e. Bluetooth) functionalities. The collected sensor data is quickly uploaded to the adafruit cloud storage before take-off and after landing at the airports. Based on comparison between collected real-time sensor data and threshold value of gas sensor aircraft support staff is alerted for cleaning the lavatories. The alert is sounded when real-time methane level exceeds the threshold value. Moreover alert is sounded when negative feedback is being given by passenger using press of touch button on the IR sensor#2.
➤During flight it is not possible to achieve connectivity with adafruit cloud. This time ESP32 directly communicates with mobile phone of aircraft support team using wifi or bluetooth frequencies.

Benefits or Advantages of Smart Lavatory system

Following are the benefits or advantages of IoT Smart Lavatory system.
➤It saves time of aircraft maintence staff and as a result they can attend more number of aircrafts to clean the lavatories.
➤The passengers feel comfortable as they can have access to the lavatory most of the time.

➤The crew members also feel comfortable as they can concentrate on other services inside the cabin.
➤The system is very cheap and can be easily deployed.
➤It does not require any maintenance once installed.

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