Author Archive: Gareth

Foobot Launches its Leading Smart Indoor Air Quality Monitor

Luxembourg based company, Airboxlab, today announces that its connected indoor air quality monitor, Foobot, is now available in the UK. Foobot is the brainchild of CEO, Jacques Touillon, who wanted to help his eldest child in his fight against asthma and after looking without success for a device to fight this invisible enemy was determined to improve his son’s health and to develop a solution himself. Foobot was born.

Foobot is the most advanced data processing smart monitor in the market, helping you take control of your indoor air quality, either by working with other home automation devices or simply by giving you detailed knowledge of something which is effectively invisible. By scanning your environment day and night and learning from your habits, Foobot will provide you warnings and actionable advice to keep your air in the home fresh and pollution free. It constantly measures VOCs, PM2.5s, CO2, temperature and humidity, and logs them in five minute intervals to find the best solution for air quality needs.

Poor air quality can impair our health, leading to symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, eye, nose and throat infections and can aggravate allergies and asthma. To protect our health and preserve our quality of life, indoor air quality is fundamental. Improving air quality in an office setting by using a Commercial Air Purifier is also important for countless reasons. In addition to keeping employees healthy, safe air quality improves productivity and performance. Foobot turns invisible indoor pollution into a tangible, visible thing thanks to its soft coloured LED light, meaning air quality can be easily viewed and assessed and appropriate action can be taken if required to improve it.

Most consumers who purchase Foobot use it as a source of knowledge, empowering them to make better choices and decisions. Foobot provides the right information at the right time to take care of existing problems and prevent the creation of new ones. This could be as simple as opening a window but with Foobot you’ll know exactly when it’s required and for how long – very useful if it’s freezing cold outside or you live on a main road! The Foobot app gives you access to real time information, so over a longer period of time, helps you understand which household products, carpets or even furniture are releasing a frequent dose of pollutant. With this knowledge, you can amend your behaviour and habits to avoid pollution production. It also creates a more comfortable living space for the whole family by ensuring it is at the right temperature and humidity. Temperature can also affect the release of pollutants in your house, such as when temperatures rise, the glue present in everyday furniture emits more formaldehyde, a well-known carcinogenic VOC.

Foobot can also work closely with other smart home devices with a connected thermostat such as Google Nest to control your home’s temperature or can communicate directly with Amazon Echo. When any pollutants exceed healthy levels, Foobot will relay this information allowing Alexa to talk about the problem to you via voice and suggest possible solutions. Foobot can essentially be an active part of the smart home ecosystem helping trigger the ventilation, filtration, purification system or appliances. With the help of IFTTT, Foobot can also connect to 120+ home appliances, including HIVE, the connected thermostat from British Gas.

Foobot uses internal sensors to check for pollution in the form of chemicals and particulate matter, which are up to five times more common indoors as a result of confinement and alerts you via its companion app and the LEDs on the device itself. The device is sensitive to:

•            PM2.5s – Particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometres, like dust, pollen and pet dander

•             VOCs – Volatile organic compounds, toxic gases like formaldehyde and ammonia. This sensor is also sensitive to carbon monoxide, a potentially dangerous gas.

•             Carbon dioxide – Exhaled naturally from humans. Not itself harmful, but indicative of poor circulation. This is measured via data from other sensors.

•             Humidity – Low humidity can cause irritation. Excessive humidity let mould and dust mites grow.

•             Temperature – Mostly for comfort, but still important to optimise

Indoor air pollution isn’t just a threat at home. We spend an average of 90% of our lives indoors, whether in a school, office, hotel, hospital or at the shopping centre. Aside from long-term health benefits, breathing clean air keeps people awake and productive, so they can work, study and play.

Clean air is even more critical for people suffering or recovering from health issues. At hospitals, well-circulated air can minimise the spread of airborne diseases. Since children are particularly susceptible to asthma, clean air at schools is perhaps more important than at home given their high occupancies. In the UK, around 5.4 million people suffer from asthma that pollution can exacerbate. For those affected, air pollution reduces life expectancy by an average of over eleven years. This is nearly 5% of all annual UK deaths but amazingly, there is very little awareness of the problem, making air pollution an invisible public health crisis that affects much of the UK.

For more information on the subject in the form of a white paper on the growing need for data in managing indoor air quality, click here