Poppy Health Measures Indoor Air Ventilation on a Massive Scale

This article describes their technology and some of the important results they achieve with it through an initiative they call BreatheEasy. How to Measure Air Quality Cheaply The inexpensive sensors used in the BreatheEasy project don’t measure the actual presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the air (although Poppy Health markets another device that does that). In fact, the sensors don’t measure any aspect of air quality directly. Rather, they determine how fast air is being removed and replaced in the room–significantly, how each building breathes out airborne viruses to keep occupants from exposing each other to respiratory infections. This ventilation rate becomes a proxy for air quality. For every room that Poppy Health wants to measure, they install two small devices. The first releases benign particles consisting of water, salt, and synthetic DNA. This mix is very easy to measure using their sensors. The second device waits 15 minutes after the release of the particles and determines how many are still in the air. The more particles containing that DNA are detected, the slower air circulation is. Figure 2: One device emits particles and another measures their presence. The advantage of this kind of indirect measurement is that devices are cheap enough to scatter throughout hundreds of buildings simultaneously. They are also easy to deploy, hundreds of buildings can be enabled within a week. Furthermore, Molyneux says the devices tend to be more accurate tha...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare IT Air Quality BreatheEasy COVID-19 Public Health devices Indoor Air Ventilation Poppy Health Respiratory Illness Sam Molyneux Source Type: blogs