Indoor air quality sensing indicators

The indoor air quality sensing indicators introduce people to novel concepts necessary for being aware and analysing of the indoor environments and help them to recognise and address indoor environmental quality problems in the building environments and the link to health, comfort and productivity of the occupants.It is known that people spend most of their time indoors, thus healthy air where they live, work and play is very critical. The European Lung Foundation (ELF) has estimated that respiratory illness in Europe costs some EUR 102 billion a year in poor inefficiency and absenteeism from work [1]. In addition, according to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoor air pollution is ranked as the highest risk to human health among all types of environmental problems [2]. The important factor and indicator for indoor air quality (IAQ) in room environment is the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO
₂
), which is detected and measured in this study. Moreover, light delivered by the indoor air quality sensing indicators guide people to healthy space, which then increase comfort and work performance. Ultimately, wirelessly connected indoor air quality indicators will become an integral part of the Internet-ofThings infrastructure. They will not only produce light. They will form an essential part of the indoor environment quality, providing decoration and serving as context-detecting sensors delivering semantic information, such as wellbeing, to other systems, such as building ventilation. The indoor air quality sensing indicators in this paper utilise low energy radio network operating at Bluetooth Smart waveband in wireless communication. The radio system provides link to a smartphone app. The CO2 sensing is based on an integrated COTS (commercial-offthe-self) sensor platform engine. The system operation is based on a microcontroller which decodes the CO2 sensor signal, and PWM (pulse width modulation) module which controls operations for light output of LED foil. In the first demonstrator, thin film LED foil is based on the green, yellow and red light emitting InGaN bare die LEDs. And in the second demonstrator, it is based on COTS RGB LED components with built in control IC, which allows individual addressable RGB LEDs. Furthermore, the RGB LED foil is injection moulded into thermoplastics to form a product with improved durability and usability. In this paper, the demonstrators as well as VTT's pilot environment - roll-to-roll (R2R) MAXI pilot printing line, Datacon 2200 EVO pick-and-place bonding machine and ENGEL hybrid in-mould integration line - will be presented.