Know what is in the air you breathe, indoors and out.
VANTIL is an environmental intelligence system we are building. It measures the air inside a home and the air just outside it, learns what is normal for that home, and explains what changes and where it likely came from.
The problem
Your air quality app describes your city. Your lungs live in your home.
Public air quality numbers come from monitors that can be miles away, averaged over hours. They cannot tell you whether the fine particles in your living room came from the kitchen, from a window left open to a busy road, or from somewhere else entirely.
Many homes sit close to freeways, ports, rail and industry. For those homes the useful question is not "what is the air quality index?" It is "is something from outside getting in, and when?"
How it works
Two sensors, one comparison, and a system that learns.
VANTIL is a pair of small sensor nodes that report to a private analysis system. Comparing what is inside with what is outside, minute by minute, is what lets it separate indoor activity from outdoor infiltration.
Measures fine particles, carbon dioxide, volatile compounds, temperature, humidity and pressure inside the home.
Measures the same particles and gases just outside, so every indoor change can be set against what the outdoor air was doing.
What it measures
Particles, gases and climate, read together.
- ParticlesFine and coarse dust (PM1, PM2.5, PM10) and particle counts by size, the signature of smoke, traffic exhaust and cooking.
- GasesCarbon dioxide as a measure of ventilation, plus volatile organic compound and nitrogen oxide indices that respond to chemicals and combustion.
- ClimateTemperature, humidity and pressure, because they change how every other reading should be interpreted.
- Sensor integrityEvery reading is checked before it is trusted. A failing sensor is flagged instead of silently believed.
The approach
Honest about what it knows.
Most monitors show a number and a colour. VANTIL is built to say why. It learns the normal pattern of a home for each hour of the day, notices when something departs from it, and tells you what changed, how big it was, and whether outdoor air was moving at the same time.
It is also deliberately conservative. What it has noticed is kept separate from what it has proven. A pattern only becomes a finding after it has been tested on data the system has not seen, and the system will tell you plainly when it does not know yet.
Where it stands
A working prototype, in a real home.
VANTIL is being developed and tested in a home beside a major freeway in Southern California. The hardware is an engineering prototype and the learning system is still accumulating data.
Stay in touch
Interested? Tell us a little.
We will use this only to share progress and to ask whether you would like to take part in future testing. We ask for no more than we need. See the privacy note.