Air Hub: engineering healthy indoor environments

Background

In the UK, people spend most of their lives indoors: mostly in homes, schools, workplaces and health and care environments. We are increasingly aware that poor quality buildings impact our health and wellbeing, with the tragic death of Awaab Ishak from indoor mold and the role of ventilation design in the spread of Covid-19. 

We know that air quality has a huge impact on our health. Poor outdoor air quality from particulate matter, nitrous oxide and ozone was estimated to contribute to 17 000 premature deaths in 2021. However, we know far less about indoor air quality. We can’t simply transfer our understanding from outside air research to the complex indoor environment, as both the composition of pollutants and the airflows that carry them are vastly different. 

As energy costs rise, people are striving to make buildings more energy efficient, both by retrofitting old buildings and in building new ones.  This provides substantial opportunities  to make buildings healthier at the same time . However, there is also a serious risk that poorly planned or executed work reduces air exchange and leads to a build up of air pollutants indoors. Further, a focus on the performance of an engineered system without considering the role of the users can cause problems. This has been well demonstrated in buildings where ventilation systems are often not used appropriately, are poorly maintained, and are sometimes even switched off and covered up, all resulting in a buildup of pollutants and often a reduction in air quality.

Who we are

Air Hub is a new interdisciplinary network of engineers, health scientists, local authorities and other partners, set up to tackle these challenges. Our vision is to create a comprehensive roadmap that enables the UK to develop engineering interventions to make indoor environments healthy. We will achieve this by creating collaborations and co-designing research projects around the following key questions:

1. How much PM_2.5 (particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns) is in indoor air?
2. What is it composed of?
3. What are its health impacts? 
4. What are the most effective and equitable ways to reduce those impacts?

Our work

The network’s activities will be designed to stimulate the development of new project ideas and enable them to happen. Specific activities will include:

• Co-creating feasibility studies and research proposals with members of the public, particularly those sensitive to the effects of poor indoor air quality.
• Developing collaborations between a range of health experts (including epidemiology, microbiology and clinical health), air quality scientists and engineers to inspire novel approaches to assess health implications of poor indoor air quality by leveraging the UKs existing birth to death cohort and large administrative health datasets.
• Working with industry to understand current and near future technologies for delivering healthy indoor environments and the industrial perspective of the related research needs.
• Exploring sampling methods to better understand the constituents of PM_2.5. Both using static samplers and personal samplers to capture variations in exposure as an individual travels through a range of engineered environments that they encounter in their daily life.
• Exploring the ethical implications of personal air quality sampling with academics and members of the public to develop research protocols that acquire useful and robust datasets while respecting a participants privacy and ensuring ethically sound research.
• Engaging with a wide academic audience through a mix of online and in person events. In particular developing the future research capacity of the UK by providing specific early career training and support to apply to our feasibility fund.