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of some uh uh money to do stuff around
air quality indoor air quality
especially um preventing viral
transmission uh in the wake of the
pandemic so um I want to flag first of
all that uh I'm an engineer by trade so
I write software I wrote the software on
the toy that you saw in the booth out
there um and I got tagged in to give
this presentation so you're going to
have to bear with me on that front um so
here's a question and uh we're going to
do Price's right rules so closest
without going over um you eat about 1.8
kilograms of food a day you drink about
2 kilograms of water a day does anybody
know how much air you consume a
day hands somebody give me a hand
yes 11,000 liters I want it by Mass
I heard 10 kilograms who was
that yeah all right toss some
one yeah let's say so 12 kilograms a day
that's a lot of air and there's stuff in
that air
um stuff in the air bad air is a bad
time so this is a this is from study
about decision-making versus carbon
dioxide content so if you ever see uh
you know you know about uh hypoxia
effect on the brain long before you ever
get to anything like passing out you
start making really bad decisions so if
you wouldn't uh sign on a house drunk
you probably shouldn't sign on a house
above a couple thousand uh PPM of CO2 or
you will make terrible choices uh the
inverse effect is also true um bad air
is a bad time also uh because it leads
to Airborne infectious disease we all
know about covid but there's plenty of
other stuff tuberculosis chickenpox
measles all that stuff um some of it
there's great vaccines against some of
it nobody really knows and you really
don't want to catch it even if you have
a not particularly symptomatic case
there's a really interesting talk about
that you can stick around for
um also um the economics of it are
incredible um trying to do clean
air-based interventions is an excellent
way to reduce things like um heart
attacks uh um sorry heart attacks
um
uh blah uh children's test scores air
purifiers in classrooms are one of the
most economically effective way to boost
test scores compared to anything like uh
teacher training other interventions you
can find direct links between uh indoor
air quality in education spaces
absenteeism um and eventual health and
economic outcomes for for the people in
those spaces um so at entropic
Engineering in open Aros we think this
is pretty cheap and easy to fix you can
have some really high impact effects um
masks especially with fit testing this
is another place where we received some
funding from bvy to work on open source
uh condensation particle counters that
can make it really easy to do this kind
of work um portable air cleaners you can
see one in this picture of our office um
Windows these ones don't open but if
you're in a place where it's
thermodynamically acceptable you can
open your windows that's an excellent
way to do some mitigation of this kind
of stuff um simple HVAC upgrades like
dropping in better filters making sure
you actually change your filters um and
we also do some work with uh skin and
eyesafe 222 nanometer germicidal UV
light like this one here there's also
one on the display table outside on the
front um unlike earlier 254 neter
Technologies this is stuff that's uh Rel
relatively easy to deploy because the
threshold for skin and eye damage is
much much higher so it's something that
you can retrofit into existing spaces a
lot more easily um is an excellent drop
in
mitigation um so here's the real
question if this stuff is so cheap and
easy you know um we've got filters in
this room we've got UV lights outside um
why isn't it already fixed well we think
one of the big reasons that it's not
already fixed is it's invisible
literally when we're talking about
particulate in the air we're talking
about particles that are so small that
measuring them requires Innovative
Technologies to make them grow
physically large enough in the device
that we work with via condensation to
make them countable because they're so
small they don't meaningfully reflect
enough light to count them even under
laboratory conditions let alone with
your eyes like think about when you see
smog outside well that is the aggregate
effect of looking through a bunch of
particles in the air when you're inside
you just can't see it and you can't
tell um what kind of particles they are
how big they are and you also can't tell
what CO2 concentrations are like so you
can't tell the extent to which your
judgment is impaired and you're going to
expect poor health outcomes like that so
um what I'm here to talk
about is uh ukrit air also known as the
Clean Air tamagachi is something we've
been working on for the last five or six
weeks um this is a portable air quality
device uh that includes a virtual pet so
the idea is uh in low power mode there's
an e in screen on top which will wake
and update periodically um you've seen
them on the Kindle so that supports
really low power operation um we hope to
get at at least a week or two out of it
um the hardware we have outside is
pre-production Hardware uh but we are
eventually hoping to sell these things
um so take that with a grain of salt
with when you play with them but they
are fun to play with because on the
bottom screen when you wake it up into
higher power mode um you have a virtual
pet character and the whole pitch of
this is that when you think about air
quality especially indoor air quality
it's something that's really easy to
ignore like you can you can sit there at
work and think to yourself I have kind
of a headache whenever I sit in this
conference room but I got something else
to pay attention to and that builds up
every time you're exposed to high CO2
levels every time you're exposed to high
particulate concentration The Chronic
health effects of all of these are
cumulative which means that um you can
ignore it and ignore it and ignore it
until 30 years down the road it turns
out that you've had sqa from multiple uh
low intensity viral infections or you
have developed chronic lung lung
problems from exposure to particulate
matter um so the concept that we have
here is a sort of gamification approach
where you and the pet are exposed to the
same air by virtue of it being with you
it has onboard sensors that can measure
carbon dioxide concentration and
particulate concentration and a couple
other fun things um except the virtual
pet reacts in real time much faster than
you do so what we're doing is sort of
hacking your judgment to say well you
know you know intellectually that
there's going to be long-term negative
effects to uh bad air quality that
you're exposed to but uh if we give if
we make those B long-term negative
effects happen on a very short term to
this little guy especially if he's cute
um it's a it's sort of a way to hack
that decision-making process um so you
can play with him you can arrange
Furniture uh you can buy for him various
clean air interventions like those that
we have here you can buy them an a HEPA
filter you can buy him UV lights you can
have them wear a mask all of that fun
stuff that we think are sort of
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um straightforward you know relatively
easy and effective intervention you can
also apply to your character
um and that uh and the idea is uh let's
take this thing that for you know on the
on the human time scale and on the human
health time scale is essentially
invisible make it very visible
especially in a relatively fun way
um make make it make a lot more sense to
pay attention to that so
um that's the concept uh I'm not going
to try and do it during the talk because
I was uh very politely informed that
they're going to drag me off stage with
a shepherd's crook if I go over but um
you can catch me after the end of this
track out front and we'll probably do a
little bit of trivia and give away the
units that we have that are
pre-production you can find more
information about them at uk.com there's
that information outside
um yeah uh so those are all
pre-production you can tell 3D printed
case um we assembled them in house so
they're a little bit of a precious
commodity but we're going to give them
away
um fun little bit of a crash project
uh blew blew the uh inseat Power circuit
breaker on the plane which apparently
they can restore um got to do some
laptop power management limiting to get
back on the road building these things
but um some other cool tricks that they
have up their sleeve compared to other
commercial air quality sensors is they
do barometric compensation for CO2 so if
you live anywhere other than sort of uh
median height in in terms of elevation
or if you're on a plane or you're
climbing a mountain um your air quality
sensor that you already have is almost
certainly lying to you if it's not
barometrically compensated so this is a
fun little trick that we do um this is
me flying from uh the last leg from
Korea to here where you can see that
without barometric compensation you're
underestimating carbon dioxide
concentration in the cabin by a couple
hundred
PPM um so we think that's a fun little
bit of Special Sauce that went into this
project um they also have a bar
barometric pressure sensor on board so
if you uh want to climb a mountain you
can track your your altitude as you go
um and the other trick that we think is
really cool and should become something
that people expect in mitigated spaces
is on the topic of uh these Airborne you
know these air quality problems being
invisible if you if you buy something
like these HEPA filters how do you even
tell if they work well one way you can
do it is you can keep track of the
carbon dioxide or um particulate
concentration in the room for HEPA
filters you're looking at particulate
but for ventilation to outside air like
you're going to open the window you want
to look at carbon dioxide um and you can
do something you can you know you can
affect an intervention like open a
window or you can affect an intervention
like turn on a HEPA filter and you can
watch the rate at which these Airborne
contaminants drop and with a little bit
of math that is baked into the UK
Critters um you can calculate
uh you know what the what the CO2
concentration change or what the
particulate concentration change tells
you about the um mitigation choices
you've made in your space usually
measured in air changes per hour which
is sort of one air change per hour means
volumetrically all the air in the room
would be cycled through once an hour um
that's great for measuring CO2 so if
you're going to affect some mitigation
like turn on your HVAC you can watch the
change in CO2 you can see a drop and if
you have a ukit with you it's Lo in um
so you can you can compute the
effectiveness of that intervention and
if you're going to switch on HEPA
filters uh you can take your UK Critter
and look at the record particul recorded
particulate concentration information
and compute what's called an effective
air changes per hour number
so
um I think that's the that's the last
cool trick for the UK Critter right now
um oh it also works as a Bluetooth
sensor you can talk to it over Bluetooth
and pull out current air quality
readings
um but it has Wi-Fi hardware and we're
excited in the future we're hoping to
ship some updates that will um let us do
privacy preserving uh aggregation of air
quality statistics sort of like existing
air quality sensor networks um but that
extend to places that might not
otherwise be reached like you know the
places you go in your daily commute that
fixed sensors aren't appropriate for um
this is open
source uh work it's uh you know we're
we're still in pre-production so you
can't I don't think the schematics are
up there yet but if you pester him in
the Discord maybe you'll get him to post
them um so if you have feedback we'd
love to hear it
um the website's out there it's also in
the firmware if you get one
uh please reach out if you'd like to
collaborate um I'd also like to say
thanks to bvy thanks to the ethereum
world I'm not a crypto person personally
but um the work that we've been up to at
entr Tropic working on the uh clean air
tamagachi but also at open Aros and the
other efforts wouldn't have been
possible without you guys so
um it's something we really appreciate I
think I'm going to wrap it there but
uh thank you so much Lewis