To meet evolving environmental standards and modern remote work demands, many building owners and property managers are placing increased focus on indoor air quality.
Data suggests the average person spends as much as 90% of their time indoors, where the airtight nature of modern, energy-efficient buildings can cause issues with indoor air pollution.
In modern buildings, indoor air can be 2-5 times more polluted than outdoor air, posing a risk to public health and the potential to drive economic loss. In an effort to address these issues, more focus is being placed on indoor air quality monitoring in homes and mixed-use buildings.
Why Indoor Air Monitoring Matters in Modern Buildings
Rising levels of pollution in urban environments and the airtight nature of modern construction are combining to cause issues with hazardous indoor air quality. Measures intended to reduce energy loss can trap pollutants brought in through ventilation systems and generated through activities like cooking and cleaning inside modern buildings, worsening air quality for residents.
At present, as many as 41% of global cities suffer from air pollution more than 7 times higher than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) safe limits. When this polluted air is brought into buildings unnoticed, it can cause serious health issues and worsen inhabitants’ quality of life.
The negative impacts of poor indoor air quality include:
- Sick building syndrome: Poor indoor air quality can cause building-related illnesses like fatigue and headaches, affecting 30% of workers in new and renovated buildings.
- Economic loss: Poor indoor air quality is estimated to cost the U.S. economy $168 billion a year in lost productivity due to workers suffering from sick building syndrome.
- Premature death: WHO data suggests 3.2 million people globally die prematurely in an average year as a result of diseases caused by unaddressed indoor air pollution.
Improving Indoor Air Quality in Homes and Mixed-Use Buildings
In an effort to address worsening indoor air quality, many property owners and managers are exploring novel ways to detect and minimize indoor air pollution. By leveraging smart devices to continuously monitor air quality and identify sources of pollution, operators can address the unique challenges facing their facilities and adjust wider systems to improve indoor air quality.
Identifying Pollutant Sources
Internet of Things (IoT) sensors installed around homes and mixed-use buildings are used to continuously monitor air quality for signs of common pollutants. Modern multi-sensor devices can accurately detect specific contaminants like CO2, VOCs and e-cigarette vapor, as well as provide live indoor air quality index readings, to help building operators tackle issues promptly.
Teams can be sent live alerts and view index readings from a remote-accessible management platform. This process supports wide-ranging applications, e.g. devices can be used as vape sensors in schools, hotels and offices, pollutant detectors in manufacturing facilities and air quality index trackers in apartments, offering operators real-time visibility into air quality issues.
Enacting Automated Responses
Through intelligent integrations, IoT sensor data can be used to trigger real-time reactions to indoor air quality issues. Operators can choose to link IoT sensors to existing infrastructure like ventilation, filtration and humidity control systems to power automated incident responses.
Unique thresholds can be set within the system to maintain safe air quality in unique spaces. In practice, this enables operators to not only engage HVAC systems in response to air quality issues, but also receive alerts and trigger unique responses to site-specific issues, e.g. vaping triggers cameras to record, moisture triggers dehumidifiers or VOCs trigger local exhaust fans.
Pursuing Continuous Improvements
Alongside helping to address indoor air quality issues in real-time, intelligent sensor systems provide operators with high-quality insights into environmental conditions over time. This data can be used to generate site-specific reports that detail pollutant levels across the property at specific times to help operators better understand the root cause of different air quality issues.
Report findings can be used to inform continuous improvements to organizational practices. For example, if VOCs are found to spike shortly after a room has been cleaned, operators can use this data to adjust cleaning schedules and turnaround times for allowing residents back in.
Creating Safer Indoor Environments for Modern Communities
As urban air pollution worsens, the importance of indoor air quality monitoring continues to rise. By deploying smart solutions to detect, address and report on air quality issues, building owners and operators can help to create safer indoor environments for modern communities.
Author: SEENE
