Nothing has been more important over the past year than our health and well-being. Never before have so many of us concentrated on monitoring our state of health or been on alert for any changes in our surroundings. Individually, among our families, and collectively, our awareness of responsibility for taking care of ourselves and our environment has been heightened – for good.
That goes for AV integrators too. Alongside the ever-present focus on lighting, audio, video, and security there is a new demand to augment the Smart Home with electronic health technologies.
Even as we emerge into the light from lockdown, we are likely to spend more of our time at home than before the pandemic. For many of us, the future of the work space will be a hybrid one spanning the office and the home office. We owe it to ourselves to balance our working and our family lives by tuning our habitat to enhance our wellness.
That’s why being able to provide solutions which can improve the mental and physical wellbeing of homeowners will be integral to the thinking of Smart Home professionals going forward.
The particular technology I wanted to highlight in this post deals directly with air purification. That’s front of mind, I feel, when all of us are thinking more about what is in the air we breathe.
DARWIN, made by Delos, a tech company headquartered in New York, is a ‘wellness intelligence platform’. It combines a suite of software, algorithms, and integrated hardware to filter contaminants and pollutants from the air, expel odours and remove toxins, pollen, harmful chemicals and pathogens.
The concentrations of many pollutants indoors exceed those outdoors, with both short and long term health impacts and DARWIN combats this too with air quality readings recorded in real-time. It’s part of a wider set of wellness sensors under the DARWIN brand that can also monitor and control water contamination and circadian rhythm lighting.
What’s interesting is that Delos has now partnered with smart home experts Crestron to integrate DARWIN into Creston controllers. For instance, when DARWIN detects an issue with air quality, it communicates with a Crestron thermostat to trigger fan speed adjustment to move larger amounts of air through the home and remediate the problem via the air purification system.
You can see all the key data about air quality in each room, such as CO2 levels, on a touchpanel or mobile app. Armed with this, home owners can make important decisions on the air quality where they live to ultimately improve their health, their energy levels and sleep patterns.
Air quality technologies are a gamechanger for individuals with respiratory diseases. Personally, I resonate with the benefits of the DARWIN due to the fact I suffered from asthma and bronchitis as a child. Having this technology back then may have made my conditions easier to manage. Unfortunately, DARWIN is currently only available in North America, but I hope either it or a similar offering will be available in Europe soon.
To find out more on the DARWIN please visit delos.com.
