The problem:

Gatherings of people in offices, classrooms and any indoor environment during the coronavirus pandemic raised significant concerns about aerosols and the risk of infection as there is a considerable amount of exhaled air containing CO2. The Federal Environment Agency of Germany and the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) published recommendations long before the coronavirus outbreak: In classrooms and offices, the CO2 concentration should not exceed 1,000 ppm but it was only during the COVID-19 outbreak that air quality monitoring has finally received the attention needed from the general public and decision makers.

Monitoring the Indoor Air Quality is now at the core of well-being and health and returning safe to work/ school/ indoor restaurants, but acting on information about the air quality is still underrated but we believe a key to staying safe and productive.

Our solution:

 Our solution does not only sense the air indoors, but will also discreetly notify occupants if the quality has worsened (e.g. VOCs or CO2 has built-up) and that they need to ventilate. Working and living in a fresh and healthy environment can profoundly improve performance, reduce anxiety, complaints (and even headaches) and allow you to focus on doing the things you love.

Existing air quality monitoring and CO2 monitoring solutions are complex to install, not easily scalable, often cost prohibitive and rarely include a mechanism to alert the end user / tenant / occupant as data is feeding into dashboards that are visible to building management employees and management.

We developed two easy to install LoRaWAN based Air Quality Index (AQI) and a CO2 sensor with LED notification and buzzer:

• The AQI sensors allows for monitoring temperature, humidity, VOC and CO2 levels as an overall index using Bosch sensing technology
• The CO2 sensor allows for monitoring temperature, humidity and actual CO2 in ppm
• Both have configurable LED (traffic light indications) and buzzer notification thresholds alerting occupants of a room when it needs ventilation and is no longer a safe and productive environment.
• Immediate notification can be configured depending on the use case to include sound, light or a combination of both.

The benefits:

These are countless Ventilation is an important factor in mitigating against the risk of far-field (>2m) aerosol transmission and the idea of installing CO2 -measuring devices in classrooms and offices, as well as other indoor public spaces like gyms, bars, and restaurants, is about preventing the spread of the virus. The solution includes easy to install, inexpensive and compact CO2-measuring devices (either AQI or CO2), connecting them to a LoRaWAN gateway and feeding the data directly to the user (by device notification), allowing for monitoring over time on the MClimate application on a phone or displaying it on a tablet in the actual room of use thus warning against high concentrations of CO2 in the air and thus also against high levels of aerosols. These could be used to indicate a potential increased risk of infection with coronavirus.