Indoor Air Quality and Wellbeing - Enabling Awareness and Sensitivity with Ambient IoT Displays

The quality of indoor air exerts influence on the wellbeing of people. However, people rarely notice a constant and creeping deterioration of indoor air. Especially in enclosed places where several people get together, like meeting rooms, school rooms and public transportation, bad air quality might cause a reduction of cognitive performance, increased headache, fatigue and sleepiness. This paper describes and discusses a privacy respecting system, built with low cost IoT components and open-source software, that informs room occupants about bad air quality with ambient lights. Additionally, the status of the windows is indicated so that they are not forgotten to be closed after airing. We conducted a workshop with an implementation of the system with five users and present the results which show the usefulness and desirability of ambient notifications for indoor air quality monitoring.

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