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Washington: Monitoring real-time indoor air quality can encourage people to change their behavior and adopt activities that generate less pollution at home, a study found.
Researchers at the University of Utah in the United States conducted a study to determine if homeowners were changing the way they lived if they could visualize the microscopic pollutants present in their homes.
"The idea behind this study was to help people understand something about the quality of invisible air in their home," said Jason Wiese, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. University of Utah.
The researchers built a series of portable air quality monitors with Wi-Fi and connected them to a server. Three sensors were placed in each of the six four-eleven-month homes in 2017 and 2018. Two were placed in different areas of the busy home, such as the kitchen or bedroom, and one at the same time. outside on the porch or nearby.
Every minute, each sensor automatically measured the air to detect PM 2.5 – a measure of tiny particles or droplets in the air of a width of 2.5 microns or less – and sent them data to the server.
The data could then be viewed by the owner on a tablet displaying air pollution measurements in each room as a line graph over a 24-hour period. Participants in the study may have access to air pollution data for up to 30 days.
To help identify air pollution spikes, homeowners received a voice-activated loudspeaker that allowed them to ask the server to indicate when air quality was measured, for example when 'a pass the vacuum cleaner.
Participants also received an SMS informing them that the quality of indoor air was changing rapidly. An owner discovered that air pollution in her home increased when she cooked with olive oil.
This motivated him to find other oils producing less smoke at the same cooking temperature, researchers said. Another owner would vacuum and clean the house just before an allergic friend would try to clean the dust.
However, she found that this worsened the situation considerably as more and more pollutants were released during vacuuming and dusting.
Realizing this, she started cleaning the house a lot sooner before the friend's visit.
Participants opened more windows when the air was poor or compared measurements between rooms and avoided more polluted places.
"Without this type of system, you have no idea of the air quality in your home," Wiese said.
"There is a whole range of things that you can not see or detect, which means you have to collect the data with the sensor and show it to the person in an accessible and useful way," he said.
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