You are what you eat. Our knowledge about how diet impacts our body and mind has come on leaps and bounds in the last few decades to the point that it would be outright strange to go back to a time when we didn’t watch our sugar and saturated fat intake. 

We’re all in alignment here, right? Diet = important. Now for another one… 

You are what you breathe. It took a global pandemic to give air quality some ‘airtime’ and yet, it quickly disappeared from people’s wishlist the moment it was deemed ‘safe’ to return society back to normal. Here are a few critical stats that get you panting and scampering after a solution to improve your facilities’ air quality (more on that solution in just a minute!) 

  1. We spend 90% of our time indoors where air quality is 2-5x worse than outdoor air
  2. A healthier work environment can reduce sick leave by 58%
  3. When CO2 concentrations exceed 1000 ppm, people’s decision-making performance worsens by at least 50%
  4. It’s estimated that 9 out of 10 people worldwide breathe polluted air

This is no joke — air quality is not a ‘nice to have’. It is critical. As employers and facility managers, we are all responsible for ensuring that our clients, teams and building users access clean air for their health, well-being, performance and happiness. 

Now we know how serious it is, it’s time to make an important announcement and provide you with the solution you need: Infraspeak’s IMMP integrated with our new official partner Airthings — the leading air quality monitoring company.

New official partner? Yup. Here’s everything you need to know

It’s been hard to keep it under wraps, but following our public announcement at the IFM Meetup Paris, it’s now official — we’re partners. After a long and fruitful integration partnership with Norwegian company Airthings, they’re joining us on our mission for integrated, intelligent facility management and we’re joining their mission — to ensure that all facility managers can provide safe, clean and healthy air for everyone. 

“Airthings provides real-time data and flexibility to tackle some of the biggest facility and building challenges faced by managers regarding indoor environments and energy efficiency. We’re delighted to partner with Infraspeak, another innovator in the space, to achieve our vision of safer and smarter facilities. This is an exciting new chapter for our companies that will help us deliver value, together.”

— Rémy Journet, Business Development Manager at Airthings

It’s a match made in heaven, and we can’t wait to start delivering value together. Before we dive into a real trial we did at our own HQ in Porto (!), let’s introduce our new partner.

Airthings is a global leader in indoor air quality monitoring and energy-saving solutions. They split their offering into three major use cases: 

  1. For Home — Airthings has helped over 100,000 homes with a suite of precision-made, intelligent sensors and hardware like this one here
  2. For Business — Airthing’s and Infraspeak’s partnership focus, their business solution prioritises data analytics and uses intuitive dashboards to create more tailored solutions that fit several key segments such as FM, providers, education and offices
  3. For Professionals — A separate set of hardware for radon professionals and technicians that want to take air quality measurements independently

Their business deployments rely on small sensors dotted around your site which take real-time measurements on key air quality indicators such as CO2, radon, particle concentration and more, and then using their Space Hub, an intelligent aggregating sensor that unites data from up to 30 nearby sensors, Airthings allows you to build rich images into your air quality. 

For more information about what they measure, they have a series of articles on each of their measurement types which is essential reading. 

“The Infraspeak-Airthings integration allows facility and maintenance managers to monitor and respond to deviations in air quality and makes predictive management of spaces a reality. The direct impact we’ve seen on our clients is better resource allocation and better user welfare.”

— Carlos Queirós, Head of Platform Partnerships at Infraspeak

Wow, and what can the Infraspeak-Airthings integration help me with? 

As you’ll hopefully have picked up, Airthings is a dynamic and boundary-pushing company that is intent on driving industry 5.0 with a powerful mix of intelligence, IoT devices and flexibility. They’re the type of business we celebrate, and integrating with their system was a no-brainer.

Here’s a run-through of some of the things you’ll be able to achieve with our two systems 

  1. Real-time control of temperature, humidity, CO2 and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
  2. Compliance with health and safety regulations
  3. Data-based HVAC preventive maintenance 
  4. Energy optimisation opportunities by correlating air quality data with energy consumption patterns.
  5. Comprehensive reporting and analytics
  6. Enhanced occupant satisfaction and well-being
  7. Remote monitoring and control through mobile applications
  8. Future-proofed facilities management processes! 

That all sounds great, but shall we have a look at a successful deployment in practice?

Here’s what happened when Infraspeak tried out Airthings 

We installed Airthings’ IoT Sensors in our Porto HQ and connected them to our IMMP. The sensors were configured so that when an anomaly or spike is detected, Airthings communicates with Infraspeak’s platform and automatically creates a work order, reducing our response time. 

Having this data-supported approach to managing our HVAC systems, not only have we been able to dramatically cut our response time for fixing HVAC equipment failures, we have reduced CO2 concentration in our HQ by 35%, this figure is even more impressive given these results were achieved in just 8 months!

The data collected by Airthings sensors is recorded and stored for analysis by Infraspeak’s team. This helps us track the history and performance of our office assets more effectively, leading to improved predictive maintenance based on concrete data and planning ahead for complex situations such as peaks in office usage when we have a big team social, or for live adjustments to be made if it is a particularly busy day. 

For more information on our trial deployment at HQ, check out this case study – you’ll learn a thing or two about our philosophies and why we love Airthings so much.

An exciting new chapter for safe facility management

Our new partnership with Airthings adds another string to our bow. We’ve focused on productivity, intelligence and collaboration, and we’ll continue to do so with the same enthusiasm and care as we have up to this point. However, what formalising our relationship with Airthings does is allow us to start prioritising new things, like health, safety and welfare. 

These are central pillars of the maintenance 5.0 playbook and we can’t wait to start working with our new Norwegian partners to optimise facilities in new, innovative ways that not only improve KPIs but also take tangible and measurable steps towards potentially stopping the spread of disease and improving happiness! 

Everything we do is about being a source of good life for everyone, and Airthings live and breathe this ideology, just like us.