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Safer and healthier Indoor Environments with the new IoT Indoor Air Quality monitoring Solution

Press Release, Paris, 4th June 2021

Actility, in joint work with Elsys.se and WMW, now offers a new Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Monitoring Starter Kit focused on enabling safer and healthier indoor environments, to help protect employees, students and workers by meeting air quality regulation levels. The solution also seeks to protect against COVID-19 spread, by controlling and monitoring CO2 levels and people’s presence in closed areas.

This Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Solution, now available on ThingPark Market, Actility’s IoT solutions marketplace, allows to control and monitor CO2 concentration, temperature, humidity, light and people’s presence in real time. The IAQ Monitoring Starter Kit provides the required hardware, software and connectivity services to assess this integrated plug-and-play solution.

The solution has an extremely easy configuration. It can be used for any indoor space like, for example, classrooms, offices, meeting rooms, shops, industrial facilities, public buildings, and much more.

Monitor your IAQ 24/7 through IoT

During the past few years, and especially since the Covid-19 crisis outbreak, Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has received increasing attention from environmental governance authorities, making IAQ standards stricter.

Studies have confirmed that people spend around 90% of their time in indoor environments, giving IAQ a significant importance on health. High levels of this indicator have been proven to be harmful to vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children or those suffering chronic respiratory or cardiovascular diseases.

The IoT Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Solution measures the indoor concentration of CO2, temperature, humidity, and light in an automatic manner and real-time, triggering automatic mitigation actions based on the presence and flow of people. The solution helps reduce the spread of Covid-19 through alerting when clean air must be brought in, and potentially contaminated air removed.

CO2 concentration is a key indicator of air quality. Studies have also concluded that areas with high CO2 levels increase COVID-19 spreading, as it is directly linked to the number of infectious particles suspended in the air. A high number of CO2 in the air also means a high number of aerosols, which increases the risk of infection for the people present in the room.

When a person infected with Coronavirus speaks, coughs or sneezes, millions of aerosols and droplets penetrate the air and spread around the room. Non-ventilated indoor spaces increase the likelihood of Covid-19 transmission through aerosols, and insufficient ventilation may lead to long-range airborne transmission of the virus and opportunistic infection. Therefore, IAQ monitoring plays a crucial role in minimizing Covid-19 viral transmission in schools, offices, restaurants, and any shared indoor area.

Indoor climate also plays a key role in health protection, as pathogens remain in rooms for hours at typical air exchange rates in residential and office buildings. Air renewal takes considerable time and so, periodic fresh air supply is recommended.

Enhancing IAQ has been seen to be as effective in reducing aerosol transmission as vaccinating 50-60% of the population, according to scientific research. The monitorization of carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particulate matter (PM), humidity, and temperature, need the installation of sensors in facilities which do not usually count on pre-existing wiring for this matter. These installations are greatly facilitated by wireless IoT networks, like LoRaWAN, ideal tech network to cover these needs.

 LoRaWAN® (Long Range Wide Area Network), is an open standard connectivity technology, proven leader for smart applications, which delivers solutions that are easy to scale, optimizes operational cost and reduces utility waste. LoRaWAN® allows to leverage its extremely long-range and low-power capabilities to cover thousands of kilometers at low cost, especially in remote areas which are challenging to reach, and to install devices, providing data in real time while lasting for years on one battery charge.

Easy to install kit format ensuring operational optimization

The solution has a focus on being extremely easy to install, with a plug-and-play feeling, making it intuitive as well as extremely precise. This solution allows to configure up to 6 parameters at once: CO2 level, temperature, humidity, luminosity, motion, and directional counting. Users can also configure both sampling mode and transmission schedule via Downlink or NFC Android cell phone application configuration.

The kit works by notifying whenever a KPI falls out of the preset range by sending a SMS or email to designated contacts, so that they can take immediate corrective action. Authorized people’s presence capacity can also be monitored in indoor closed areas, preventing overflooded zones.  Automated compliance reports for all monitors facilities areas are produced on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule delivered via emails.

LoRaWAN® technology gets leveraged by optimizing asset’s energy consumption and providing lower operational costs. It is also extremely easy to use and available as on-premises & cloud-based application, offering the option to manage the installation from one single application dashboard with easy accessibility, usability, management, and control, while being completely data-driven, automating compliance reports and alert notifications sent via SMS or email.

Everything included in the kit:

The kit, which offers a 3-month trial, is equipped with the following devices:

Figure one

Elsys.se ERS CO2 sensor device. Smart LoRaWAN sensoring device which have the capacity to measure CO2 levels, temperature, humidity, and luminosity of indoor environments and report the data to the application to activate any alerts and events based on the preset KPIs.

Thanks to Elsys’ sensor, users gain full access to the information and control over the air quality, while detecting motion with Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors to monitor the flow of people preventing over occupied areas.

Figure two

Parametric PCR2 device. An integrated dual-channel radar transmitter which allows directional people counting (left/right), to detect people passing by. These sensors are also GDPR compliant, as they do not include any cameras for counting, and are resistant to extreme temperatures, up to -20°C ​ or +70°C.

Figure three

UfiSpace Enterprise Indoor Gateway. Thanks to this gateway, LoRaWAN coverage can reach the whole deployment. This gateway has an intuitive web and application interface for easy installation.

Figure four

Access to the WMW application and a 1-hour training to get to understand it. WMW offers the hub where all the data is collected and distributed. The version included in the kit offers diverse features such as device, employee, or infrastructure management, as well as the opportunity to set alarms.

This WMW application helps to manage entire facilities or buildings while presenting complete overviews of health status, ensuring that people are kept safe and in perfect environmental conditions.

Figure five

3-month subscription to the ThingPark Enterprise SaaS service and an hour of technical assistance during the trial period. ThingPark Enterprise is the leading LoRaWAN® private networking solution that streamlines the digitalization of business processes by connecting assets with efficiency.

By deploying ThingPark Enterprise, customers benefit from a dependable, secure, and scalable private LoRaWAN® connectivity infrastructure to enable a wide variety of IoT use cases. 

ThingPark Enterprise streamlines IoT network operations,  providing enterprises with a proficient UX to easily build a multi-gateway LoRaWAN® network and feed data to IoT applications. ThingPark Enterprise dashboards provide key operational insights & alarm management. LoRaWAN gateways and devices are managed by a fully geo-redundant platform with 24/7 supervision.

About Elsys.se  

 

ELSYS is a leading provider of LoRaWAN® sensors, connected devices, and network solutions. Elsys provide our own products in connected vehicles, logistics, and LoRaWAN® for the professional market, with products deployed in many countries around the world. They also provide development services in electronic hardware and software design with the main focus on wireless sensors and embedded systems.

Contact: https://www.elsys.se/en/kontakt/

About Parametric

Parametric GmbH is an Engineering & Products Company located in Switzerland. They focus on highly reliable digital platforms for smart transport and smart infrastructure applications, turnkey solutions and lifecycle services.

Contact: https://parametric.ch/contact/

 

About WMW

The WMW platform gathers, processes and analyzes data collected from people and things. Review, predict and prevent situations and act accordingly! Optimize, increase and become more efficient! 

 WMW is a hub where you combine your operational data with information provided through sensors and people. The hub acts as a single user interface to collect, visualize and manage all assets over various locations and use cases. Everything you want to know about your assets, people and external services can be linked digitally to your organization. WMW can be part of a dedicated end-to-end solution or serve as the single point of operation for multiple sensors, projects and sites. 

Contact: https://www.wmw-hub.com/contact

About UfiSpace

UfiSpace takes pride in being the industry’s leader for innovation and leading the way for the next generation of 5G open network solutions. Yet, not forgetting their humble beginnings, they also strive to bolster our ecosystem of partners in order to provide the best and most impactful solutions for their customers. Their customer centric values enabled UfiSpace to be the pioneer for disaggregating and open networking solutions with industry firsts for cell site gateways, the core network and edge network. UfiSpace’s focus has been high-end networking solutions to ensure their commitment to their customers for fast time-to-market and state-of-the-art disaggregated open networking platforms.

Contact: https://www.ufispace.com/contact

About Actility   

Actility is a world leader in Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) industrial-grade connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things. Actility provides its ThingPark™ platform and network technology to deploy, operate and maintain public and private wireless IoT networks within a unified, scalable and versatile network infrastructure. The vast majority of nationwide LoRaWAN® network service providers (over 50) and hundreds of companies trust ThingPark™ all over the world. Through its subsidiary Abeeway, Actility also provides patented ultra-low power tracking solutions. ThingPark Market offers the largest selection of interoperable IoT gateways, devices and applications to simplify and accelerate deployment of use cases.  

Contact us here: https://www.actility.com/contact 

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