Only by using the naked eye will we see the severity of a badly polluted weather outdoor and reluctantly put on our mask to protect our personal health. However, most people do not realize or put much emphasis on indoor air quality, assuming we are protected from the bad enough weather outside.
iCelery is an air quality indication device specifically for in-vehicle environment. Now you wouldn’t have thought about how bad the air quality can be in a car?
The fact is, vehicle interior made of plastics and adhesives, and the air conditioning are all likely to contain harmful substances, which can potentially cause harm to our bodies in an enclosed in-vehicle environment.
Furthermore, it is impossible to report on a real-time in-vehicle air quality condition via an official weather reporting channel as every vehicle condition is different. Vehicle owners will then be clueless of the air quality other than trying to sniff for a gauge.
Attkon, the team behind iCelery, aims to raise awareness of this problem and provide a quick fix to it. They hope to leverage on old designs and concepts in order to bring new and interesting intelligent hardware products that focus on environment, health, automobile etc.
iCelery uses in-built VOC sensor (generally used in luxury vehicles) for users to understand the interior air quality, reminding owners to enable ventilation or use air purifiers. Indications of pollution, exhaust gas poisoning or in-vehicle combustion and more can be detected using iCelery.
iCelery is made up of sensors and Bluetooth chips, has a size (8*8*2mm) shaped similar to the USB stick and is powered by the vehicle’s USB port.
The in-vehicle air quality indication device has a life-span of five years and uses Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (BLE) to connect to your phone and app that acts as the platform for you to track the air quality.
The team behind iCelery hopes to build their own data community upon successfully acquiring a critical mass of users and provide the information collected to parties in the automobile industry for analysis, with the aim of improving in-vehicle air quality.