Scaling Clean Air: Now and the Future by Louis Goessling | Devcon SEA

[Music] of some uh uh money to do stuff around air quality indoor air quality especially um preventing viral transmission uh in the wake of the pandemic so um I want to flag first of all that uh I'm an engineer by trade so I write software I wrote the software on the toy that you saw in the booth out there um and I got tagged in to give this presentation so you're going to have to bear with me on that front um so here's a question and uh we're going to do Price's right rules so closest without going over um you eat about 1.8 kilograms of food a day you drink about 2 kilograms of water a day does anybody know how much air you consume a day hands somebody give me a hand yes 11,000 liters I want it by Mass I heard 10 kilograms who was that yeah all right toss some one yeah let's say so 12 kilograms a day that's a lot of air and there's stuff in that air um stuff in the air bad air is a bad time so this is a this is from study about decision-making versus carbon dioxide content so if you ever see uh you know you know about uh hypoxia effect on the brain long before you ever get to anything like passing out you start making really bad decisions so if you wouldn't uh sign on a house drunk you probably shouldn't sign on a house above a couple thousand uh PPM of CO2 or you will make terrible choices uh the inverse effect is also true um bad air is a bad time also uh because it leads to Airborne infectious disease we all know about covid but there's plenty of other stuff tuberculosis chickenpox measles all that stuff um some of it there's great vaccines against some of it nobody really knows and you really don't want to catch it even if you have a not particularly symptomatic case there's a really interesting talk about that you can stick around for um also um the economics of it are incredible um trying to do clean air-based interventions is an excellent way to reduce things like um heart attacks uh um sorry heart attacks um uh blah uh children's test scores air purifiers in classrooms are one of the most economically effective way to boost test scores compared to anything like uh teacher training other interventions you can find direct links between uh indoor air quality in education spaces absenteeism um and eventual health and economic outcomes for for the people in those spaces um so at entropic Engineering in open Aros we think this is pretty cheap and easy to fix you can have some really high impact effects um masks especially with fit testing this is another place where we received some funding from bvy to work on open source uh condensation particle counters that can make it really easy to do this kind of work um portable air cleaners you can see one in this picture of our office um Windows these ones don't open but if you're in a place where it's thermodynamically acceptable you can open your windows that's an excellent way to do some mitigation of this kind of stuff um simple HVAC upgrades like dropping in better filters making sure you actually change your filters um and we also do some work with uh skin and eyesafe 222 nanometer germicidal UV light like this one here there's also one on the display table outside on the front um unlike earlier 254 neter Technologies this is stuff that's uh Rel relatively easy to deploy because the threshold for skin and eye damage is much much higher so it's something that you can retrofit into existing spaces a lot more easily um is an excellent drop in mitigation um so here's the real question if this stuff is so cheap and easy you know um we've got filters in this room we've got UV lights outside um why isn't it already fixed well we think one of the big reasons that it's not already fixed is it's invisible literally when we're talking about particulate in the air we're talking about particles that are so small that measuring them requires Innovative Technologies to make them grow physically large enough in the device that we work with via condensation to make them countable because they're so small they don't meaningfully reflect enough light to count them even under laboratory conditions let alone with your eyes like think about when you see smog outside well that is the aggregate effect of looking through a bunch of particles in the air when you're inside you just can't see it and you can't tell um what kind of particles they are how big they are and you also can't tell what CO2 concentrations are like so you can't tell the extent to which your judgment is impaired and you're going to expect poor health outcomes like that so um what I'm here to talk about is uh ukrit air also known as the Clean Air tamagachi is something we've been working on for the last five or six weeks um this is a portable air quality device uh that includes a virtual pet so the idea is uh in low power mode there's an e in screen on top which will wake and update periodically um you've seen them on the Kindle so that supports really low power operation um we hope to get at at least a week or two out of it um the hardware we have outside is pre-production Hardware uh but we are eventually hoping to sell these things um so take that with a grain of salt with when you play with them but they are fun to play with because on the bottom screen when you wake it up into higher power mode um you have a virtual pet character and the whole pitch of this is that when you think about air quality especially indoor air quality it's something that's really easy to ignore like you can you can sit there at work and think to yourself I have kind of a headache whenever I sit in this conference room but I got something else to pay attention to and that builds up every time you're exposed to high CO2 levels every time you're exposed to high particulate concentration The Chronic health effects of all of these are cumulative which means that um you can ignore it and ignore it and ignore it until 30 years down the road it turns out that you've had sqa from multiple uh low intensity viral infections or you have developed chronic lung lung problems from exposure to particulate matter um so the concept that we have here is a sort of gamification approach where you and the pet are exposed to the same air by virtue of it being with you it has onboard sensors that can measure carbon dioxide concentration and particulate concentration and a couple other fun things um except the virtual pet reacts in real time much faster than you do so what we're doing is sort of hacking your judgment to say well you know you know intellectually that there's going to be long-term negative effects to uh bad air quality that you're exposed to but uh if we give if we make those B long-term negative effects happen on a very short term to this little guy especially if he's cute um it's a it's sort of a way to hack that decision-making process um so you can play with him you can arrange Furniture uh you can buy for him various clean air interventions like those that we have here you can buy them an a HEPA filter you can buy him UV lights you can have them wear a mask all of that fun stuff that we think are sort of [Music] um straightforward you know relatively easy and effective intervention you can also apply to your character um and that uh and the idea is uh let's take this thing that for you know on the on the human time scale and on the human health time scale is essentially invisible make it very visible especially in a relatively fun way um make make it make a lot more sense to pay attention to that so um that's the concept uh I'm not going to try and do it during the talk because I was uh very politely informed that they're going to drag me off stage with a shepherd's crook if I go over but um you can catch me after the end of this track out front and we'll probably do a little bit of trivia and give away the units that we have that are pre-production you can find more information about them at uk.com there's that information outside um yeah uh so those are all pre-production you can tell 3D printed case um we assembled them in house so they're a little bit of a precious commodity but we're going to give them away um fun little bit of a crash project uh blew blew the uh inseat Power circuit breaker on the plane which apparently they can restore um got to do some laptop power management limiting to get back on the road building these things but um some other cool tricks that they have up their sleeve compared to other commercial air quality sensors is they do barometric compensation for CO2 so if you live anywhere other than sort of uh median height in in terms of elevation or if you're on a plane or you're climbing a mountain um your air quality sensor that you already have is almost certainly lying to you if it's not barometrically compensated so this is a fun little trick that we do um this is me flying from uh the last leg from Korea to here where you can see that without barometric compensation you're underestimating carbon dioxide concentration in the cabin by a couple hundred PPM um so we think that's a fun little bit of Special Sauce that went into this project um they also have a bar barometric pressure sensor on board so if you uh want to climb a mountain you can track your your altitude as you go um and the other trick that we think is really cool and should become something that people expect in mitigated spaces is on the topic of uh these Airborne you know these air quality problems being invisible if you if you buy something like these HEPA filters how do you even tell if they work well one way you can do it is you can keep track of the carbon dioxide or um particulate concentration in the room for HEPA filters you're looking at particulate but for ventilation to outside air like you're going to open the window you want to look at carbon dioxide um and you can do something you can you know you can affect an intervention like open a window or you can affect an intervention like turn on a HEPA filter and you can watch the rate at which these Airborne contaminants drop and with a little bit of math that is baked into the UK Critters um you can calculate uh you know what the what the CO2 concentration change or what the particulate concentration change tells you about the um mitigation choices you've made in your space usually measured in air changes per hour which is sort of one air change per hour means volumetrically all the air in the room would be cycled through once an hour um that's great for measuring CO2 so if you're going to affect some mitigation like turn on your HVAC you can watch the change in CO2 you can see a drop and if you have a ukit with you it's Lo in um so you can you can compute the effectiveness of that intervention and if you're going to switch on HEPA filters uh you can take your UK Critter and look at the record particul recorded particulate concentration information and compute what's called an effective air changes per hour number so um I think that's the that's the last cool trick for the UK Critter right now um oh it also works as a Bluetooth sensor you can talk to it over Bluetooth and pull out current air quality readings um but it has Wi-Fi hardware and we're excited in the future we're hoping to ship some updates that will um let us do privacy preserving uh aggregation of air quality statistics sort of like existing air quality sensor networks um but that extend to places that might not otherwise be reached like you know the places you go in your daily commute that fixed sensors aren't appropriate for um this is open source uh work it's uh you know we're we're still in pre-production so you can't I don't think the schematics are up there yet but if you pester him in the Discord maybe you'll get him to post them um so if you have feedback we'd love to hear it um the website's out there it's also in the firmware if you get one uh please reach out if you'd like to collaborate um I'd also like to say thanks to bvy thanks to the ethereum world I'm not a crypto person personally but um the work that we've been up to at entr Tropic working on the uh clean air tamagachi but also at open Aros and the other efforts wouldn't have been possible without you guys so um it's something we really appreciate I think I'm going to wrap it there but uh thank you so much Lewis