How bad is the air quality in your home?

Washington DC

What if you could see the microscopic air pollutants in your home?

In a new study, engineers have discovered that visualising how bad air quality is in your home can help mitigate pollution.

They conducted a study to determine if homeowners change the way they live if they could visualize the air quality in their house. It turns out, their behaviour changes a lot.

Lead author Jason Wiese said, "The idea behind this study was to help people understand something about this invisible air quality in their home."
During the day, the air pollution inside your home can be worse than outside due to activities such as vacuuming, cooking, dusting or running the clothes dryer. The results can cause health problems, especially for the young and elderly with asthma.

University of Utah engineers from both the School of Computing and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering built a series of portable air quality monitors with Wi-Fi and connected them to a university server.

To help identify when there might be spikes in the air pollution, homeowners were given a voice-activated Google Home speaker so they could tell the server to label a particular moment in time when the air quality was being measured, such as when a person was cooking or vacuuming. Participants also were sent an SMS text message warning them whenever the indoor air quality changed rapidly.

During the study, researchers discovered some interesting trends from their system of sensors, which they called MAAV (Measure Air quality, Annotate data streams, and Visualise real-time PM2.5 levels).

Researchers also learned that circumstances that made the air pollution worse differed in each home. Vacuuming in the home, for example, would cause different reactions to the air quality. They also learned that if homeowners could visualize the air quality in their home, they always stayed on top of labeling and looking at the data.

The study involves engineering in collaboration with other University of Utah scientists, including biomedical informatics and clinical asthma researchers.

The full findings are present in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Tech. ANI