Managing Indoor Air Quality With Sensors in the Workplace
With miniaturised, low-cost sensors, it is possible to visualise indoor air quality at unprecedented scale.
Clean air is one of the foundations of a healthy workplace. It is critical for enhancing productivity, comfort, and well-being among occupants and can help reduce illness and absenteeism. Managing indoor air quality (IAQ) focuses on two main elements: delivering abundant fresh air and controlling common pollutants in the air, such as particulate matter, toxins, and allergens.
There are a variety of building codes and government health and safety standards that support healthy air in commercial workspaces. Today, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified public scrutiny and media coverage of indoor air quality, raising an important question for commercial real estate operators and tenants: Are existing standards and practices sufficient?
What is good air quality?
Indoor air can be polluted, or made stale, by gases or tiny particles emitted from many sources. One example is if smoke from outdoors gets inside. Humans are also a source of indoor air pollution, and the minimum requirements for air turnover in buildings are designed to flush out bioeffluents and nuisance odours from occupants.
There are ways to control these pollutants and achieve good indoor air quality.
Maintaining in optimum conditions the HVAC system (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning System), which is responsible for replacing and cleaning used air through ventilation and filtration
Source control, aims at preventing the use of polluting materials or activities in the first place
Practices to keep spaces clean, dry, and hygienic are important to avoid mould and the buildup of allergens and toxic substances on surfaces
The role of low-cost sensors
Well-managed buildings use the previous strategies to maintain good air as part of standard practice. The commercial real estate industry is enhancing the way it manages buildings to accommodate a heightened level of concern—not just from Covid-19, but also from wildfires and outdoor air pollution.
With newly available, miniaturised, low-cost sensors, it is financially and technologically possible to visualise indoor air quality at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. This ability is particularly important now, during a moment of disruption in commercial real estate. (Note that low-cost particle sensors count or weigh all particles in the air but cannot directly differentiate particle types, such as the virus that causes Covid-19.) Data that these sensors can provide help ensure new practices are effective and have positive health impacts, considering the unique mix of conditions in a particular environment.
Things to consider when using sensors
Sensor data, on its own, is useless. Building owners and operators don’t improve spaces by enhancing them with sensor networks. They improve well-being and productivity by acting on the right data, in the right ways. To do this, they need:
Contextual data, often referred to as “metadata”: information on the building, exposed population, and measurement quality
Discernment: the ability to interpret what the data tell us about how good a space is. The interpretation for sensors requires new scientific knowledge, because the data are more distributed and ubiquitous but less reliable when considering a single measurement point than equivalent “traditional” measurements.
Ability to act: the ability to connect data to building controls or to decision-making processes
These are early days for IAQ sensors in commercial real estate, and there are not only questions about their proper use but also about their value and potential risk. How can industry experts account for the elements of air quality that matter for well-being but cannot be reliably or cheaply sensed? And how can we future-proof the changes we make to our infrastructure today, as the technology continues to advance at a rapid pace?
At Memo Design Studio, we design around ergonomics, functionality, business requirements, design/aesthetics and safety parameters to improve the wellbeing and productivity of the staff inhabiting our workspaces. Therefore, we consider air quality fundamental to get right in all our projects. We work with project consultants ensuring the best possible air quality can be achieved from day one, acknowledging longevity and budget.
Extract from “The role of new sensors in managing indoor air quality” by Seema Bhangar - Senior indoor air quality manager at WeWork - November 16, 2020