Air pollution is one of the leading causes of adverse acute and chronic cardio-respiratory problems, worldwide. Poor indoor air quality is a rising concern as humans spend &gt;90% of their lives indoor. To better study indoor air quality in such environments, a low cost, portable, IoT sensor-based device was built and deployed at the indoor and outdoor locations at two sites - a university and a hospital. The device was designed to monitor the concentrations of aerosol particles (0.3 – 10 µm) in real time and simultaneously collect particles using the principle of electrostatic precipitation for off-line analysis. Our goal was to obtain baseline information about the size-resolved aerosol concentrations at high spatial and temporal resolution, and their correlation to the airborne microbial population. At both the university and hospital, aerosol particle number concentrations positively correlated with the human occupancy and activities. The number concentration trends showed a striking commonality at all the ten indoor sites of both the university and hospital. Further, the influence of outdoor PM to the indoor sites was found by analyzing the I/O (indoor-outdoor) concentration ratios and with the statistical analysis such as Pearson correlation and principle component analysis (PCA). While human and soil associated airborne bacteria such as Bacilli (25%) and Actinobacteria (20%) was found to be relatively abundant in all the indoor sites, few notable clinically relevant airborne bacteria (~5%) belonging to the class Burkholderia and Pseudomonas, known to cause health-care associated infections (HAI) were found in the hospital air samples. We will present the device design details and the findings from lab performance tests and field measurements.

Design and performance of a portable device for characterizing indoor and outdoor air

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.