Smarter Home Indoor Air Quality Monitoring System

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is one of the leading environmental risks, which affects people's, comfort, health, and well-being. People spend around 90% of their time indoors, and daily exposure to indoor air pollutants may occasionally be more than 10 times higher than outdoor pollutant (EPA). It is estimated, for instance, that up to 20% of the population suffers from asthma and other allergic diseases caused by substances typically present in indoor environments. In addition, indoor pollutants such as tobacco smoke, radon, asbestos and formaldehyde may substantially contribute to the increase of cancer incidents in the population. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 700,000 people per year die from poor breathing conditions. Clearly, IAQ has a significant impact on people's comfort and health.

In this proposal, we plan to develop an ultrasensitive home-based IAQ sensing system that can detect adverse levels of pollution, predict and identify the pollution sources, and provide actionable suggestions to help people improve IAQ. Using this new system will enable users to correlate household tasks to pollution events and take action to reduce them. We believe this will lead to a behaviour change and positive action to reduce IAQ that affects their health.

The new IAQ system would have the capability to detect and measure specific, high risk and common harmful pollutants and particulates alongside other indicators of IAQ and ventilation including carbon dioxide, ambient temperature and humidity. We would also use machine learning techniques to analyse the sensor data to accurately predict an increase in pollution levels, identify the potential cause and inform prevention and mitigation measures.

The IAQ system would be designed to meet the user requirements and to also measure the pollution levels accurately. We would modify our gas sensor array platform to detect key common hazardous pollutants formaldehyde (<10ppb) and carbon monoxide (ppm). Our new pollution gas sensor array would be integrated with commercial sensors, (carbon dioxide, total volatile organics (TVOCs), particulate sensor, temperature and humidity and has Bluetooth connectivity) to make a new air IAQ system.