SCC-PG: Developing technological solutions to improve indoor air quality and thermal comfort in urban communities

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The goal of this project is to improve the indoor air quality and thermal comfort of at-risk urban communities. Indoor air quality is the leading housing health concern of both renters and homeowners with more than one in three renters and one in four homeowners expressing concerns over, for example, dust, mold, dampness, and lack of sufficient ventilation. The Environmental Protection Agency ranks indoor air pollutants amongst the top five environmental risks to the public as they can be up to 100 times higher than outdoor pollutant levels. However, current limitations in sensor spatial and temporal resolution have restricted the ability to accurately forecast indoor air quality. This planning grant will support the development of a research plan for a sensing, modeling, communication and visualization platform for forecasting indoor air quality incorporate input from a set of stakeholders—including, residents, activists, local government policy makers and regulators. The project will be based in New York City and the preliminary research will be conducted in two communities: one in the South Bronx and another in Harlem. The long-term aim is to establish a technological framework to combat socioeconomic inequities in exposure to air pollution that could be scaled up and applied across different cities. The planned experiments will help to identify the primary indoor polluatnts that impact the communities partnering on this project and will help to partition the impacts of outdoor and indoor pollutants on indoor air quality. The work will also identify the role played by urban morphological and human behavioral characteristics on indoor livability and will allow for testing of various sensing and communication platforms. Last, it will involve piloting a data visualization tool that will inform communities and public health officials about unsafe indoor air quality and temperature conditions and suggest appropriate actions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.