According to research by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an increased level of CO2 in the air can significantly reduce a person's cognitive abilities: when the level of CO2 is twice as high, cognitive abilities decrease by 15%, and if the level increases by three times, a person's ability to think, navigate in space and assimilate information halves. That is why the Lyceum needs to create comfortable learning environment, compliant with the Russian SanPiN standards.
Key Challenges
- Improve the comfort of the children studying at the Lyceum;
- Increase the Lyceum's prestige as one of the most innovative schools in Russia.
Solution
Implemented our solution
- The solution for monitoring air quality provided by ICL Services is an appliance that includes equipment for analysing air parameters, IoT gateways and a software part consisting of embedded software and cloud infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure.
The Air Quality Monitoring solution was submitted to MS IoT Accelerator, a professional competition run by Microsoft, where ICL Services successfully passed the selection stage. This allowed for attracting funding to develop the first pilot version of the product while Microsoft obtained one of the first Azure-based IoT products.
The ICL Services team has developed a sensor network, based on devices that do not support the IP protocol; it even includes devices with ultra-low computing power. What makes this solution so innovative is that ICL Services experts managed to merge multiple relatively cheap devices into a sensor network that supports mesh technology. Because of this, it is enough to put one IoT gateway with access to the school's internal network for providing coverage across the huge area of the school floor, with all endpoint devices acting as repeaters for each other. This approach eliminates the need to deploy any specialised infrastructure (such as LoRa base towers). In addition, there is no need to manage contracts with a mobile network operator, unlike with NB-IoT. Moreover, in a situation where one of the endpoints fails, the incident will not affect the ability of the network to continue transmitting data.
During the implementation of the project, the team solved several problems:
- A large number of endpoints could not operate within the WiFi network deployed at the school. This required looking for alternative network standards. As a result, a radio frequency was chosen, and the transport and application protocols were developed independently to reduce the processing power requirements of endpoints.
- Several options for placing sensors inside device cases were developed in order to obtain measurements with the smallest deviations from the real values.
Results
- The Lyceum monitors air quality on a regular basis.
- Indoor air quality analytics are collected throughout the building.
- The Lyceum staff are able to receive notifications about the current CO2 level and the need to ventilate the classrooms and other premises.