alt Hacker NewsI really wish a Apple or another major OEM would integrate CO2 monitor into watches or smartphones. Suddenly, everybody would be aware of the CO2 level in the room, get alerts, etc. and the problem will just solve itself.
There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.
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I think the issue is that the common tech requires sensors in an air-chamber. E.g. NDIR works by firing IR at a frequency that is absorbed by CO2. A sensor on the other side either measures the amount of IR light that got through (optical NDIR) or pressure/sound waves (photoacoustic NDIR). I guess that it's hard to use any existing sensors, because they are relatively large and probably water could easily get into the chamber.
Would be extremely cool if Apple, Samsung, and others can crack this, though I think they'd have done it already if it was easy.
I guess the problem is with the price of the sensors. Just look how expensive the Aranet 4 home shown in article is. There are worse devices for less like the IKEA alpstuga. I also don’t know how much electricity they pull.
I built a conference badge with a proper, laser-based CO2 sensor.
It didn't work very well because just by virtue of being near me all the time, it didn't get a very good measure of the average room contents.
Is it a tually lower oxygen in the blood that's the problem, or higher co2? I'm not sure if having high co2 automatically implies lower oxygen, I have no idea at all but feels like it may not necessarily be strictly. Linked. Also, are the cognitive issues of low oxygen the same as high co2 or do they produce different effects?
There is one in the EcoBee Premium and we use it to automatically drive our HRV (heat recovery ventilation.).
It is better to have it in the HVAC system than in your phone anyhow:
This would probably be the biggest awareness thing tech could do for climate change as well.
> Raising awareness is the only real solution.
You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization.
And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best.
Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations
I was looking at CO2 sensor module boards this week and the sensors themselves are quite large and the floor price is $15ish.
CO2 and all other air quality indexers have to be very carefully calibrated regularly. It's not some slop you can just throw into a consoomer cheap iot device.
Article author completely ignores this for the obvious reasons.
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Apple watches already have a blood-oxygen sensor so it's covered, albeit indirectly.
> There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.
Not wrong, but it is perhaps worth noting that there are already standards for proper ventilation. Generally you're looking at 5–10 cfm/person (2.5-5 L/s), depending on the facility and purpose of the room; see Table 6.2.2.1 in ASHRAE Standard 62.1 for the US:
* https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...
Maybe set up a monitor, but if the room/facility has recently been renovated and meets modern (>2013) building codes, this 'should' have already been taken into account.