Traffic pollution in office buildings drives innovative indoor-outdoor air quality management

Extensive research has shown that indoor air quality is often worse than outdoors. Closed system buildings trap harmful particles inside, and external air intakes can bring in more polluted air from outside. Whilst many heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC) use particle filtering, managed through air exchanges, they can often worsen levels of polluting gases, such as NO2 – now classified by the World Health Organisation as a Class 1 carcinogen. Natural ventilation systems have no particulate filtration at all, and buildings are also frequently completely shut up all night with no ventilation running, trapping the pollution that has built up over the day.

Unlike outdoor air quality (which the government is responsible for), indoor air quality is the responsibility of the building owner or manager, and with research proving that poor air quality has a significant impact on human health, air pollution should be a key factor of employee health and safety.

Future Decisions has teamed up with AQMesh and UK distributor, Air Monitors Ltd, to supply pollution mitigation to improve indoor air quality. Future Decisions has developed patented smart management strategies that aim to reduce internal air pollution by 30% – this is usually enough to bring the air quality within UK & EU regulatory levels, and often within the World Health Organisation levels.

AQMesh measures NO, NO2, O3, NOx, CO, CO2, SO2, PM1, PM2.5, PM10, temperature, pressure and relative humidity in a small pod which can be mounted both indoors and outdoors on a wall or post. Batteries, solar power and DC power options give flexibility of mounting anywhere. AQMesh was designed to offer an easy-to-use air quality monitoring system that can deliver localised real-time readings, improving the accuracy and scope of gathering air quality data in order to support initiatives to reduce air pollution and its risk to human health.