CO2 levels are locally elevated in the area where you exhale. Someone sitting at a desk with their hands on a keyboard exhaling through their nose would be producing a directed stream of elevated CO2 straight at the sensor on their wrist. Same thing if someone puts their phone on their desk.
Even with the IKEA and other cheap sensors that are becoming popular, there is a learning curve where users discover that putting it on their desk right in front of where they’re breathing produces higher numbers than having it even 5 feet away.
The false positives from having a CO2 sensor that close to everyone’s face would be causing unnecessary alarm all over.
> There are so many rooms, classrooms, movie theaters and other places with poor ventilation where you just feel dizzy, or fall asleep, not knowing it was just due to lower oxygen levels in your blood. Raising awareness is the only real solution.
If someone is falling asleep in this many different places I would suspect undiagnosed sleep apnea or another condition first and foremost. Spaces like movie theaters have very high volumes of air due to their size and commercial building HVAC has much higher standards for air circulation than even your home. If someone was falling asleep in so many different places then the most likely common theme is that person and it should be checked out!
This is another reason why putting CO2 sensors on everyone’s wrists would be a mistake: It would start getting blamed for every vague condition people experience. This has already happened with wrist-worn heart rate monitors. My friends in the medical field see people all the time who come in with vague complaints and they’ve self diagnosed as being related to their heart because they can see their heart rate now.
You also have the wrong idea about what elevated CO2 does. It doesn’t reduce the oxygen levels in your blood. It makes it more difficult for your body to expel CO2, which can produce subtle changes in many processes.
I would imagine it's still relative unlike temperature on the wrist (which is too affected by body temp)
That's the same area we inhale from... Wouldn't be right to measure there then? It's not like we're interested in the amount of CO2 on the ground (in this discussion)
It is not possible to come up with a different baseline for wrist-worn monitors because the measurements could change significantly based on even small factors like the position of the wrist or smartphone.
It would be like the weather station telling you it was 160 degrees outside because they put their thermal sensor on the asphalt, but you wanted to know the air temperature.
The CO2 content is a single chemical species within a mixed gas. Any air currents will cause mixing. Otherwise it undergoes diffusion which is actually a fairly slow process, although much faster in gases than in liquids.
I’ve done development on products with CO2 sensors and I’ve spent a lot of time with them on my desk right in front of me and also off to the side. Readings right in front of me are predictably higher.
You can breathe into a CO2 sensor 18 inches from your mouth and watch the values spike upward.
And, spoiler alert: if the entire area in front of you has an increased CO2 concentration, then your environment has an increased CO2 concentration. That’s the entire point.
Suffice to say I disagree strongly with both the argument that this would lead to hugely erroneous readings and also with the notion that people would panic.
Not wrong, but it is perhaps worth noting that there are already standards for proper ventilation. Generally you're looking at 5–10 cfm/person (2.5-5 L/s), depending on the facility and purpose of the room; see Table 6.2.2.1 in ASHRAE Standard 62.1 for the US:
* https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...
Maybe set up a monitor, but if the room/facility has recently been renovated and meets modern (>2013) building codes, this 'should' have already been taken into account.
Whenever I travel, I bring a CO2 meter with me. It’s amazing how often the air is bad. Often in unexpected places. My meter hit 3100 in an uber once. I didn’t even notice until I got to my hotel room and looked at the data log. It was a fresh, hot day outside. The uber had windows closed and AC on. I bet he had no idea - but he was driving with significant cognitive impairment. Takeoff and landing in planes are always the worst. If you get sleepy as the plane is taking off, it’s not you. The plane’s ventilation doesn’t work properly when the plane is stationary. So before a plane is in the air, they often hit 2500.
Metrology calibration is necessary if you want accuracy better than 10%, but most of us don't care at all about that, instead we care about increments of 200ppm or more.
It’s like if someone said ‘you can check if your chatbot’s news feed is complete and up to date by asking it for ‘recent mass shootings’. There should be two or three in the past seven days’. It’s true and a valid methodology but holy crap does it say something dark about where we are.
- Plenty of people live or work in older buildings, where are not up to standard. For example: my office probably violates the air quality sensibilities of the Victorian era, which is when it was originally built.
- Equipment breaks down, isn't operated properly, or wasn't installed correctly. Having monitors that measure air quality is an extra check. While you may not be able to get direct action upon a consumer sensor, it can help you push for action.
I've been in buildings of varying quality over the years. I've seen how it takes time to get people in to do air quality testing. Heck, I saw the government claim that the air quality was acceptable in schools during the pandemic because the schools had passive ventilation systems. That meant they could open windows. (To be fair, the air quality in most of those buildings was probably fine since that was how the buildings were designed. That said, such standards make it easy for some buildings to slip through the cracks.)
So yeah, sensors to the people!
I've been involved with the build out of several office spaces in new and old buildings. We always took this sort of thing seriously and measured each room independently for a week (many at a time) ensuring we accounted for periods of high occupancy.
This let us tune the HVAC systems to operate more efficiently, ensuring comfortable temperatures and air circulation. Every time I've seen this done there were structural deficiencies that required remediation, some times it meant adjusting duct work.
Most modern office buildings are designed to be a platform for constructing spaces, as spaces usually evolve and change between leases and tenants. They're designed to accommodate this sort of thing.
However I've found that no build out nails this the first time. It's very hard! Often times things look fine but once you get people in the space things change drastically. It requires time and effort to address.
Several of my offices had such good air that I'd prefer being there over pretty much anywhere else -- even outside on poor AQI days.
I've also found that a lot of offices don't do any of this and their air quality is noticeably poor. And lastly I've found that the oldest buildings, including schools -- and I'm talking really old -- have very good air because they are so incredibly leaky. They're usually harder to cool and heat, though.
I agree with OP. I don't always carry it along, but it has been a massive boost to my productivity.
The only issue this house had was it overheated. We had glass facing south. Even in winter it instantly became too hot.
The link I pointed to is all about ventilation, so just because people ignored an important component of building science, and focused on one aspect, does not invalidate it.
And while climate change is important and using efficiency to deal with it is useful, the thermal control layer is actually the least important of the four:
* https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-the-p...
'Bulk' water (precipitation) and moisture can cause deterioration of the building materials (rot, crumbling), and also mold, which has its own health effects. Leaky houses can often blow conditioned air at much faster rates than thermal leakage.
HRVs only deal with temperature, but then you have humidity that is non-controlled: moisture coming in during the summer, and getting vented out in the winter (too-dry air coming in).
ERVs handle both.
Would be extremely cool if Apple, Samsung, and others can crack this, though I think they'd have done it already if it was easy.
The question is if oxygen levels are as good an indicator as CO2 levels... I suspect not.
Clean air contains about 20.9% O2 and 0.04% CO2. At 2000 ppm CO2, which according to the author is bad enough to impair judgement, that's 0.2% CO2, it that CO2 is the result of respiration, it means that about 0.2% O2 was consumed, so that's a drop from 20.9% to 20.7%, a very small difference. 20.7% is not low enough to have a significant effect, the CO2 itself is the problem, not the drop in O2. And using O2 concentration as a proxy for CO2 doesn't look reliable to me: the difference is small and other things, like humidity can affect O2 concentration.
As for the sensor, O2 sensor in cars compare the O2 concentration between the outside air and exhaust gases, it needs outside air as a reference, but what you are measuring is the outside air itself, you don't have that reference.
I dont know anything about human respiration, but I know a little about chemistry and theres no reason to assume this is true. Basic stoichiometry.
According to a random article on the internet[1], nominal co2 production is 80% of oxygen consumption.
Your point appears broadly correct, just wanted to point out some faulty reasoning that could lead to incorrect results in the future.
[1] https://societymechanicalventilation.org/wp-content/uploads/...
Source?
It looks that some O2 sensors that don't require a reference have been used (titania sensors) but even though they have some advantages, they are less precise and mostly obsolete.
CO2 was measured with infrared but water also absorbed it, so you need to heat things up enough to not have water. It can be small, but not watch small.
All and all interesting stuff!
Can't you just measure CO2 "naively"; but then also, separately, measure rH; and then use the rH value to grab a research-calibrated LUT to pass the raw CO2 value through?
(I presume this is why all the little standalone CO2-sensor boxes you can buy also have rH displays. They're measuring it anyway to normalize the CO2 value, so they may as well make it a feature and display it.)
But...oxygen concentration is essentially indepedent of CO2. We measure CO2 at part per million levels, whereas O2 is 20% of the air.
(In that context CO2 is surprisingly toxic given that 1000 ppm can impair mental acuity).
The goal of a gasoline engine's sensor is to accurately and precisely measure the point where O2 concentration reaches zero, so ambient air levels are not quite as relevant.
Probably. ISTR that depriving a body of oxygen results in a different response than overloading the body on CO2. It's why if you completely displace all air in the room with CO2, people choke, panic, etc, but if you use Nitrogen, people just keel over dead without realising it.
We evolved to detect CO2 because that's by far the easiest thing to detect that's still a reasonable proxy for the performance of our respiratory system
It's about pH. CO2 creates carbonic acid when it dissolves in water. Your blood pH, in turn, controls how much you feel like you need to breathe. So with high CO2, your respiration rate slows down, and that can lead to low oxygen levels.
Note that the physiology and biochemistry of this is complicated (e.g. blood is a very good pH buffer and it's actively regulated by kidneys etc) and it's very much a nascent field of research, so I think AI will be overconfident and hallucination-prone.
Source: I worked in high-co2 caves for my PhD so have read about this a lot. I always carried a CO2 monitor. Our rule was to get out if we saw 20,000 ppm or greater. I spent thousands of hours above 10,000ppm.
It was the first time that I heard about them. These basically never happen if your body and environment are halfway decent, but they are important in exceptional situations.
Pretty sure I learned the effect was the opposite (high CO2 --> slower respiration). Note that that was ~15 years ago when I would have read that. Maybe I just misunderstood, or thinking has changed.
edit: reading now I see I was wrong about this. Thanks for the correction!
You can hit this breathing by yourself in an unventilated 3x3m room (literally measured in my house).
I wonder how many driving accidents can be saved by having a co2 monitor in the car.
And (maybe less realistically) what if the theater puts 5 Apple sensors inside a sealed CO2-free chamber, spread around the room?
If you had the data, what would you do to change it? Would you recommend everyone go outside? You can do that without the data.
Would you wear your own oxygenated supply of air? You can do that without the data.
Would you make recommendations that the office should improve air quality? You can do that without personalized real-time data.
I'm not against data in general, but the idea that if only we had data we would make changes in our lifestyle is not valid. We see it all around us.
We had bathroom scales for over a century, but the data or insights didn't put a dent in the obesity epidemic.
You're right about "the problem will solve itself", but it isn't the data that will help to solve the problem, it's creating a simple and obvious solution.
A friend has a start-up in the commercial air quality space which solves for this problem (in some ways). But the benefit isn't the air quality, it's the cost of maintaining the healthy levels required in commercial buildings. Air quality is the secondary benefit of reduced electricity demand in air circulation.
(Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)
A price of 30 EUR makes this sensor really easy to pick up. For the same price as one Aranet (~180 EUR) the typical household can place a sensor in every room of the house. Which provides far more accurate readings for the whole house than just one high-end sensor in one room.
But when it goes over the safe limit it should be enough to decide to ventilate.
If you want a CO2 meter on the cheap, either wire up an optical NDIR sensor like the SenseAir S88 (22 Euro) up to an esp32, which is possibly the best sensor you can get for the money (slightly cheaper version of the sensor that the AraNet4 uses). Or if you want something standalone with a display, get the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 for ~50 Euro, which uses a photoacoustic NDIR, but is still miles better than the sensor in the ALPSTUGA. Can also be hooked up with HA through an ESPHome BLE proxy or with the SwitchBot Hub.
You can find a comparison of the IKEA sensor with other affordable sensors here:
https://danieldk.eu/hardware/smart-home/ikea-alpstuga
(Upd: the IKEA does have lower accuracy, with ±100 ppm instead of ±30 ppm. From the SEN63C datasheet)
You forget to mention that it is ±100ppm plus ±10% of the ambient ppm, which makes a big difference. At 1000ppm it's ±(100ppm + 0.10*1000) = 200ppm and that's only in an environment with 25C, 50% RH, and 1013 mbar. So, that does not tell you much, given that thermal conductivity is very sensitive to environmental factors.
I dont need to know the exact level, just give me a green/yellow/red LED and make it cheap so I can have a sensor in every room
If it makes you feel better I don’t see a problem with it.
and if sometimes you ventilate a bit sooner than required, at 700, what?
businesses will not put $200 meters in every room
There are good $50 Euro meters. Besides that, I am not sure if that is true, at my wife's workplace, they put high-end CO2 meters in every larger room where multiple people meet. Admittedly, this was during COVID, so a lot of organizations were using CO2 levels as a proxy for finding whether a room was properly ventilated.
I was shocked to see just how fast CO2 climbs while in a room, and how just opening the window just a crack was enough to restore the room to baseline co2.
The thing runs on usb 5v so the power consumption is negligible. It also plugs in to home assistant great.
It is a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect way of measuring CO2 and is very sensitive to environment factors. You only get somewhat good readings in lab conditions.
Don't by the ALPSTUGA for anything but very rough trends, there are much better affordable options.
Also in my experience it’s much more accurate than that.
Besides that, what's the point? There are much better meters in a similar price class. As an additional benefit, they can last months or up to a year on two AA batteries.
ALPSTUGA is an inferior product.
"oh no I am getting too much fresh air"
I get your point but come on.
At any rate, this is really a weird discussion, because you can get far more accurate meters at similar price points. Why waste your money on a much worse meter?
They recently overhauled their lineup and replaced all Zigbee devices by Thread + Matter. Some of the new devices (mostly those who support TouchLink, e.g. some of the lights) have a secret pairing mode with which you can use them with Zigbee, but it's only a subset of the new products.
Uuh, seems not keeping up with social media finally backfired. That sounds horrible! So far IKEA been a great experience when it comes to HA+Zigbee stuff, and I started buying stuff relying on they'd keep just keeping up with that, really sad to hear they've changed course.
The "secret pairing mode" stuff sounds the same as currently/before though, but they only do so for a subset is new and hope they again change their mind.
If you already own the ikea hub, they secretly put thread radio in it which was just sitting unused in preparation for this range.
There are also strong downsides though, one is privacy and future cloud lock-in. Zigbee is fully local. Previous Thread standards added the option for NAT64 so that Thread devices can access the internet and there were some Thread + Matter devices that already require internet access for full functionality (IIRC some Nuki smart locks, but I might misremember). However, Thread 1.4 also adds support for Thread devices to get a globally routable IPv6 address. The Thread 1.4 whitepaper is pretty blunt about what this enables:
Simplified Cloud Integration: Thread devices can now seamlessly connect directly to cloud services, enabling remote control, monitoring, and over-the-air firmware updates.
https://www.threadgroup.org/Portals/0/Documents/Thread_1.4_F...
The fact that Thread and Matter are strongly pushed by Google, Apple, etc. should tell you enough.
Now, a TBR may simply allow you to disable NAT64 or globally routable IPv6 addresses (e.g. Home Assistant's addons), but many consumer implementations don't. E.g. the Apple TV is a Thread Border Router and does not allow disabling NAT64, so Thread devices can access the internet, send analytics, and can be cloud-controlled.
Also, the ecosystem is still pretty immature, as a result of which you can encounter issues, typically resulting in unstable device connectivity. E.g. TREL does often does not work well. Apple has some hacks to fix most of the issues, but it only works well between Apple devices. So it's generally the best to avoid combining multiple TBRs into the same network.
Better than what already exists and is deployed? I dunnno, hardware already in use always beat "hardware conceptually better but I don't have it", that's why Zigbee is better, for me. Protocols much like everything in the world, isn't correct/incorrect or universally "better", it's all down to use cases.
Personally, as someone who started to rely on IKEA providing Zigbee devices, Thread is obviously worse, because 100% of the devices I have are already Zigbee and not Thread.
It's a vastly better system and the transition period is so smooth because the smart home companies have been deploying the thread hardware for years before anyone started using it.
Also worth mentioning that many modern Zigbee radios can also be Thread thread radios using different firmware. There are even multi-PAN radios that can do Zigbee and Thread at the same time. Some smarthome hubs use multi-PAN (e.g. Homey Pro), but it's generally recommended against now because of lower reliability.
The same applies to devices, e.g. some of the new IKEA devices work over Thread or Zigbee (Zigbee pairing is triggered using a non-documented sequence, presumably they added support for TouchLink). Or e.g. the Aqara FP300, which can be flashed with Thread + Matter or Zigbee firmware. It works because the same radio can be used for both protocols.
There’s a huge leap from that to the power consumption being low enough to be integrated into a smartphone, as demanded by OP.
However, this assumes the sensor would fit in a smartphone, which is not a given. And these things need air flow. And they also wouldn't work while the phone is in a bag or a pocket.
Not sure about that, at least NDIR sensors have to be at certain elevated temperature to work and they do some preheating when you turn them on from standby.
So it's not possible to just measure less often as then energy would have to be spent on heating the sensor.
It can't be much, since the Aranet 4 can run for years on 2 AA batteries.
It didn't work very well because just by virtue of being near me all the time, it didn't get a very good measure of the average room contents.
It is better to have it in the HVAC system than in your phone anyhow:
You'd have to raise awareness on every single person in the room and them sustain pressure to the organization in order to have proper CO2 levels in the room/organization.
And then you have to align every other person on every other organization to do this as well and hope for the best.
Or, you can do the right thing and have the state introduce regulations
The rooms being discussed here are mostly ones which would have been built before this was taken more seriously. Classrooms, older office buildings, etc.
NYC is full of buildings which would never pass any code today but are still happily occupied. It’s a trade off, I think.
Best solution.
But seriously, so much care needs to be taken here. OK, well "care" at least. Employers certainly would benefit from scrubbing CO2 from the air, in terms of productivity. I'm willing to bet that with central air it would be quite easy, and even with heat and AC off, lots of places still circulate the air regardless.
So the central place to scrub is already there.
But then you have other issues. Such as, will your body adapt to 8 hrs of reduced CO2, and then you become torpid and barely awake when not at work. Such a horrid thought, that is to me. And what if employers learn that the tiniest boost of O2 helps too! Now your body becomes accustomed to that, and what are the long term effects there?
I can personally envision myself being concerned. I guess the legislation could be crafted to "the same CO2 levels found just outside of downtown city core" or some such blather. Maybe even same for O2. So that you're at least pegged to something normal for the area.
Maybe that's where the state could come into play. A simple, highly accurate monitoring station which has an API to be polled.
Come to think of it, CO2 and O2 rates fluctuate during the 24 hour cycle. Trees need O2 to live, but only produce O2 during the day. And so differing amounts of light might mean up and downs in these numbers. It may be another circadian rhythm. Getting it the same as in a nearby forest, might be the healthiest thing of all.
The place to look is existing codes for ventilation. Exempli gratia: https://dos.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2020/09/2020-mcnys... (see PDF page 46). Regulations to enforce outside air being brought into human spaces already exist.
I have been in some office buildings in United States which had CO2 monitors in each meeting room, and the ventilation would engage to control CO2 below a set level. We would entertain ourselves by exhausting our lungs onto the sensors to trigger the ventilation system.
In terms of outside air, a lot of US cities I think would not benefit from that, all that much. Especially during certain parts of the day, with a lot of smog.
But regardless, all that entered my mind was "Once employers are required to add any form of scrubbing, and perhaps O2 injection, they'll over do it for optimal employee output." Regardless of whether it's helpful once the employee leaves the workplace.
I'm not against this, I'm just actually saying the regulation should be locally defined.
Scrubbing indoor CO2 is sensible only when you want to go below the outdoor CO2 level, not at levels above it.
The main question is: If your workplace, city, whatever forces you to work or live in an harmful/unhealthy environment, do you have any realistic course of action to improve the situation? In the US you would call this (gasp) regulation, I would call it a basic human right.
If we talk about stairways, nobody complains about building regulations that mandate handrails. CO₂ levels are not totally different.
IIUC they also need fans. The one I have in my home has one that's actually integrated into the sensor unit.
Article author completely ignores this for the obvious reasons.
A sensor mounted in the office will get calibrated every night when the office is empty.
But close enough for most purposes. We aren’t doing laboratory measurements here, I just want to know whether or not to open a window.
What I do at home is I have multiple meters bought over the years, not all at once. If one of them is too deviated, I can replace it, but this deviation has never happened in the last five years. It did happen once about ten years ago with an old model.
> Pulse oximeters have some limitations. They can only employ light at two wavelengths. Thus the devices can only distinguish between hemoglobin and oxygenated hemoglobin. When carboxyhemoglobin and methemoglobin are also present, there are two additional wavelengths required for differentiation. In the presence of elevated carboxyhemoglobin levels, pulse oximetry overestimates the true saturation of oxygen as carboxyhemoglobin binds with a higher affinity than oxygen. In the case of carbon monoxide poisoning, the absorbance spectrum of carbon monoxide is very similar to hemoglobin, which results in a falsely high level of oxygen (overestimation of oxygen saturation) ...
Why only 2?
1. CO2 has effects on the human body of its own that aren't simply a lack of oxygen, and vice-versa. [0]
2. The baseline proportions involved aren't close, so even doubling CO2 isn't going to show up easily as a large swing in in oxygen%.
For example, the article references a study where the CO2 proportion going from 0.04% -to 0.25% correlates to mental problems.
Even if the watch could sample atmosphere directly, is it sensitive enough to detect a shift from 21.00% -> 20.79% oxygen?
As it's estimating oxygen in the owner's blood, it might not detect anything different at all... not if the owner's body has already compensated by breathing harder or by "underclocking" their brain to make dumber decisions.
I'm finding that pretty difficult to believe, to be quite honest with you.
And before you say "aha, carbon dioxide brain fog!" consider that I'm about a mile from the sea with a 40mph onshore breeze. This air is about as oxygenated as it gets.
I don't think it's too far-fetched for a quarter of that to cause subconscious cognitive effects, that could be measured in tests.