TwinAIR

Digital twins enabled indoor air quality management for healthy living.

The Challenge

How does air quality affect people’s health, and how can we improve it in indoor spaces?

Our Solution

Leverage the Smart Citizen open hardware platform to develop state-of-the-art low-cost indoor air quality sensors.

Type of Project

Research and Innovation Action for Global Challenges in health funded by European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under Grant Agreement 101057779.

Project Outputs/Applied Technologies

A novel set of tools for identifying sources and tracing a variety of pollutants and pathogens, for understanding their effects on health, and for controlling building to mitigate their impact.

The Project

TwinAIR aims to improve urban life by tackling the challenge of indoor air quality (IAQ) improvement by understating its complex interrelationship with external factors. This is achieved by introducing a novel set of tools for identifying sources and tracing a variety of pollutants and pathogens, for enhancing understanding of their effects and assessing their impact on health, for controlling building management systems and services in ways that mitigate part of the impacts and for helping citizens to develop better insights into pollution impacts, along with encouraging healthier, more sustainable choices. TwinAIR embraces bleeding edge innovation in urban sensing (chemical and environmental sensors), data analytics and visualisation (digital maps and real-time video analysis), smart buildings (digital twins and virtual sensors) and behavioural insights (citizen participation, gamification) to deliver a nascent solution. It is implemented across six diverse pilot sites in Europe (ES, IE, UK, SE, DE, EL) with demonstrations covering residential dwellings, public administration buildings, hospitals and schools, along with selected types of vehicles (buses, vans). TwinAIR?s toolsets will empower students and their parents, commuters, workers and residents to make more health-aware personal decisions about their everyday mobility options and use of indoor spaces, through access to insightful analytics and engaging visualisations of their data, as well as by their participation in educational events and activities. At the same time, it will provide rich evidence to transport planners, facility managers and policymakers about factors influencing IAQ and effective interventions for mitigating its effects on health and wellbeing. By democratising cutting edge innovation in sensors, digital twinning and visual analytics, TwinAIR will enable better decision-making about future mobility policies, built environment management and incentivisation of citizens. Project TwinAIR is part of the European cluster on indoor air quality and health.

Our Contribution

We will develop tools and sensors for measuring air quality, based on our Smart Citizen project, and build models that represent indoor environments for health and environmental researchers to use them.