We spend a lot of time indoors – in our homes, workplaces or stores. Yet many of us remain blissfully unaware that the air we breathe inside can often be more polluted than what we breathe when we’re outside.
For the Telefónica backed video series The Trailblazers (where we discover and profile those millennial founders whose inventions use tech for good), we found a startup tackling this issue of air quality. In a recent episode, my co-curator Danny Bartlett and I met the co-founder of Bristol startup Altitude Tech, Sam Nwankwo. Sam and his team have whipped up a rather nifty device that could have substantial impact on our wellbeing – Sensly.
Sensly is a portable, smart air-quality sensor which tracks air pollutants in our indoor environment, using industrial-quality electro-chemical sensors to ensure an accurate reading of toxic gases. It then pushes the information directly to your smartphone with real-time updates. If the app records worrying levels of say carbon monoxide or nitrogen oxide for instance, it will send you immediate, proactive measures that you can take to tackle the issue. It will also track the humidity of your environment – extreme low or high levels of this can seriously damage your lungs.
“I want Sensly to have communal value, by allowing you to share the information its collected with your local network of people,” shares Nwankwo. What spurred him on to create this? He continues: “Simple – we wanted to create a smart device that would actually help you keep your home safe from domestic accidents and hence benefit wider society.”
At a time when it feels like there’s a slew of smart devices for the home being rolled out each week, it’s critical to sift through the lot and weed out the gimmicky gadgets. Sensly however, is one of the credible inventions. What’s particularly impressive here is that Nwankwo has taken sensors that are traditionally quite challenging to calibrate and essentially made it plug-and-play. This is a stellar example of using a technology previously proprietorial to the technical community and making it accessible to the wider population.
To understand how entrepreneurs like Sam can be better supported across the world, Telefónica has commissioned the most comprehensive “Index on Digital Life” ever developed. Within the Index, entrepreneurship is identified as a key factor for countries to consider when trying to create a better digital lives for their citizens. You can read more about the Index here when it launches next week.
Shivvy Jervis is producer of The Trailblazers and Digital Futures – follow her on Twitter @shivvyjervis
