Nanoenvi IAQ monitors will be provided fully interoperable with Gatekeeper ecosystem to deployed at a pilot location. Given devices will gather real-time metrics about air quality enough to calculate the most relevant environmental indices for elderly health and wellbeing: sick building syndrome index, comfort index, COVID 19 risk index, EPOC risk index and/or VOCs allergic risk index.
ENVIRA was chosen in the first Open Call of the Gatekeeper project, the European Multi Centric Large-Scale Pilot focusing on smart driven data solutions for personalized early risk detection and intervention funded by HORIZON 2020 programme. Its main objective is to create a GATEKEEPER that connects healthcare providers, businesses, entrepreneurs, elderly citizens and the communities they live in. This connection between stakeholders will promote an open, trust-based arena for matching ideas, technologies, user needs and processes, aimed at ensuring healthier independent lives for older adults.
To this end, ENVIRA will incorporate Nanoenvi IAQ 4 Gatekeeper, to continue to extend the Gatekeeper ecosystem with other applications, tools or components which will be included into the Gatekeeper portfolio and offered to pilots and platform designers and developers. Nanoenvi IAQ 4 Gatekeeper will address the Dynamic API injection challenge, one of the 6 Challenges proposed by the 1st Open Call.
The GATEKEEPER (GK) project is an EU-funded initiative under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. Its main objective is to create a gatekeeper that connects healthcare providers, businesses, entrepreneurs, elderly citizens, and the communities they live in, focusing on Artificial Intelligence & Big Data applications, tools, or components to help ensure healthier independent lives for older adults.
The proposals should address one of the following 6 challenges:
- Dynamic API injection
- Risks detection and timely response
- Informal care coordination system
- Increasing insights from HER’s unstructured data (risks prevention)
- Robot companions against social isolation
- Embedded ML in Smart Devices
In total, 114 proposals were received at the GK 1st Open Call, addressing the 6 challenges, with applicants from 23 countries across the world. During two weeks in March, 26 external experts performed an independent evaluation of the proposals using the defined evaluation criteria and ranking them according to their average score.
‘Nanoenvi IAQ 4 Gatekeeper’: ENVIRA’s proposal
ENVIRA’s project has been ranked 1 in the Dynamic API injection challenge. ‘Nanoenvi IAQ 4 Gatekeeper’ proposed the monitoring of environmental conditions for minimizing the risk of contagion by COVID-19. Studies have found that there is a close relationship between air quality and coronavirus. Knowing indoor air quality data helps create a safer environment and inactive the presence of the virus indoors, especially in spaces frequented by older adults.
ENVIRA’s proposal is aimed at making Nanoenvi IAQ interoperable with devices and services from Gatekeeper ecosystem (Challenge #1), making extensive use of WoT artifacts and services. As a result, Nanoenvi IAQ services will be able to calculate environmental indices from data pushed by GK sensors. GK AI services will also be able to access environmental indices from Nanoenvi IAQ services to enrich their datasets and features.
10 Nanoenvi IAQ monitors will be provided fully interoperable with GK ecosystem to deployed at the selected pilot location. Given devices will gather real-time metrics about air quality enough to calculate the most relevant environmental indices for elderly health and wellbeing: sick building syndrome index, comfort index, COVID 19 risk index, EPOC risk index and/or VOCs allergic risk index.
Environmental indices for elderly health and wellbeing
Some of the most relevant environmental indices for elderly health and wellbeing, implemented by Nanoenvi IAQ platform are:
- Thermal Comfort Index (TCI)
- Air Quality Index (AQI)
- Indoor Air Quality Index (IAQI)
- Asthma Risk Index (ARI)
- COPD Risk Index (CRI)
Environmental risk for COVID19 transmission
Nowadays, the most trending environmental index implemented by Nanoenvi IAQ platform is the COVID19 environmental risk index. And, for the time being, this is the most relevant and critical index for the elderly too. C19-Index measures the safety of a given indoor location and the risk of prevalence and transmission of COVID19.
To predict COVID 19 risk, the algorithm uses the following heuristics:
- Consideration of social distancing based on CO2 levels. If the CO2 ppms are higher than 1,000 ppm, the space is very crowded, and it doesn’t guarantee the social distance recommended to prevent the influenza virus.
- The level of ventilation and air renewal based on the concentrations of gases (CO2, CO) and particles (PM 10 and PM 2.5).
- The ease of aerial transmission of viruses based on the levels of particles (aerosol) in the air (PM 10 and PM 2.5)
- An indicator of the cleaning operations carried out, based on patterns in VOC concentrations.
- The facility of viruses to stay in the air, based on the current relative humidity. Several researchers support that keeping relative humidity between 40%-60% plays a role in seasonal disease transmission and reduces the infectious rate.
- The lifetime of viruses based on temperature.
