By Vanni De Sequera
We spend up to 90% of our lives indoors, both at work and at home, yet the misconception remains that indoor air is healthier than outdoors. In truth, the air inside can be five times more polluted than it is outside.
This cognitive dissonance may be best understood because indoor air seems so much more sterile—devoid of the nuisances of the occasional dust storm, heat of the midday sun, dark plume from a jeepney’s exhaust, and constant urban noise pollution that accompany our experience during even a short walk along a city sidewalk.
Scores of peer-reviewed studies, however, have shown that poor indoor air quality in the workplace negatively affects cognitive performance, productivity, and general health (even mortality!). The estimates vary, but billions of dollars—maybe tens of billions—are saved by manufacturers worldwide annually via less absenteeism due to adequate indoor air quality levels. The science behind this is by now beyond dispute.
With a class-leading 10 environmental and pollution parameters, uHoo is the most advanced indoor air-quality monitor in the market. When placed inside a space, uHoo’s state-of-the-art sensors will measure in real time that area’s (1) temperature, (2) humidity, (3) nitrogen dioxide, (4) particulate matter, (5) carbon dioxide, (6) carbon monoxide, (7) ozone, (8) volatile organic compounds, and (9) air pressure levels.
You might ask, what’s Number 10? While all previous eight variables are equally crucial in optimizing employee performance, the uHoo’s Virus Index may be the most important factor of all in determining workplace morale during these nervous and uncertain pandemic times.
The (10) Virus Index of uHoo is capable of ranking the extent the indoor air quality inside a place of business heightens or impedes the survival of harmful viruses (1/10 is the best score; 10/10, the worst)—never before has the quality of the air we breathe at the office been more central to our mental and physical well-being.
If, however, a business has multiple sites that need constant monitoring to ensure peak efficiency, Cortex Enterprise Solutions will help decode the boatloads of unstructured data with its Helios software platform. Think of it this way: uHoo supplies the sensor-based statistics; Helios allows you to adapt to this information overload by equipping enterprises with previously unheard of agility—in a digestible dashboard—that can put out fires before they even start.
Helios by Cortex Enterprise Solutions can automate your equipment to react to problems, in real time, in the workplace via its Internet of Things-based system of hardware and software connectivity.
Helios is so adaptable it can even “cluster” the readings of each uHoo parameter according to a client’s needs. Say, there are 10 floors in your building that you want to monitor. Clients of Cortex Enterprise Solutions can request that Helios allows them to view their property in highly customizable zones. For example, you could cluster the lobby of your building with its basement for combined monitoring.
If a client has multiple sites (say, 30 of them) spread out across the Philippines, the user-friendliness of Helios makes it uncomplicated to problem-solve potential indoor-air quality, as well as power management, issues in any of them. The 30 sites appear as color-coded pins on a map of the Philippines. Each pin will be shaded green, yellow, or red representing the three safety levels of the readings provided by uHoo.
When a pin turns red (meaning the readings are at a critical level), the property manager can then zoom into the relevant property using Helios, which then guides him or her to a floor-plan view that shows where the uHoo and Cortex devices are installed in the offending area. The property manager can now identify which environmental or pollution parameter needs to be addressed. Or he or she could simply allow Helios to do the job.
Aside from empowering you with unprecedented visibility over your properties via a monitoring system that provides real-time alerts and notifications, Helios also offers a control function that can automatically turn on or off any attached equipment. An air purifier, for example, could be automatically turned on if the carbon dioxide reading on a particular floor of a building exceeds 800 parts per million. Helios can also automatically turn off an air-conditioner if the temperature drops to an uncomfortably chilly 17°C.
Helios in combination with uHoo takes away the inherent delays and possible errors of human reporting on a per site basis. Helios also removes the need to allocate manpower resources to monitor multiple sites. Lastly, Helios can also shift the burden of ensuring optimal indoor air quality from fallible human guesswork to the industry-leading precision of uHoo’s sensor-based monitoring.
