Researcher Blog: Indoor Air Pollution - More Than Just Hot Air!
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The effects of air pollution aren’t just longstanding illnesses like asthma and respiratory diseases, which are estimated to cause up thousands of deaths per year; the short-term consequences also include brain fog, sick house syndrome and impaired cognitive ability. Children in classrooms with poor air quality may see their concentration drop and their grades suffer, older people may find it harder to think and complete day-to-day business. It’s often the most vulnerable that are affected, children may be affected during stages of key development. It’s an issue I’m incredibly passionate about and I’m glad to be working on systems to help people adapt and cope.
Our research at NAQTS focuses on creating sensors that talk to each other to help understand and explore the difficult challenges in managing indoor air quality within schools. My focus was on the balance between energy usage, stakeholder requirements and indoor air quality. This balance is trickier than just turning up the heating and opening windows, which leads to greater energy bills and involves people at different levels; including policy makers, teachers and children.
These challenges and conflicts begin to form a trilemma, which each corner (what stakeholders want and need, energy usage and air quality) all opposed. My research explores how this trilemma can be understood, managed and balanced using distributed sensor systems.
With the pandemic fresh in our memories, it’s important to move forward with sustainability and responsible air quality management at the forefront of our minds.
In my PhD, I’ve been collecting data from classrooms across the country and dived into feedback. Teacher’s often comment on the air using phrases like “stenches of year six are common”, with students agreeing that classrooms feel “stuffy”, “constricting” and “agitating”; leading to difficulties in concentrating. The research on indoor air quality and long-term health effects is damning, with the World Health Organisation recognising it as the greatest threat to public health.
Alongside direct interviews I’ve been collecting data on what the air is like in real classrooms, with mixtures of usage and occupancy as well as well increasing class sizes and spreading airborne viruses. Understanding the effects of indoor air pollution on learning is vital to shine a light on the trilemma.
with quantitative datasets. By creating these air quality stories we can help stakeholders understand the air around them, helping them to save energy, reduce their carbon footprint all whilst creating healthier indoor spaces.
NAQTS sensor technology, combined with my novel research in understanding the air quality trilemma outlined above, involves a distributed sensor approach, to collect more refined information about what’s going on in the air. This would help deliver actionable information to occupants such as teachers and students to make better decisions on how they ventilate and heat their spaces. This would help schools reduce their energy costs and has potential for up to a 15% reduction in a school’s carbon footprint.
My work may only be a small part of solving the air pollution problem – but the tools we’re building will hopefully pave the way for safer spaces for all.
This project is funded as part of ECO-I NW, hosted at the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation, Lancaster University and supported by National Air Quality Testing Services.
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