Innovate UK launches £100,000 indoor air quality competition

Organisations have been invited to apply for a share of £100,000 as part of a new government competition to tackle indoor air pollution.

Action to reduce the health impacts of harmful air pollutants tends to focus on the outdoors, however, indoor levels of some air pollutants can often be far higher.

The government says they want to raise awareness of this and so have launched the competition in order to find solutions to the problem.

Innovate UK, working on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (URKI), will provide the funding for the chosen projects. 

In the brief, the government says that the product must enable households to measure, visualise and respond to harmful household air pollutants in order to protect public health.

They add they are looking for monitoring devices that go beyond just measuring pollution and instead devices should create visualisations of information to promote individual responses to protect health.

The chosen projects must also consider user experience, show a clear plan for commercialisation and show a strong connection between the proposed activities and relevant academic research on exposure to harmful pollutants. 

The competition opened last week (February 20) and will close April 15,  a selected panel of assessors will then review each application, and then the chosen companies will be awarded contracts and provided with feedback. 

Phase one of the project will focus on exploring the feasibility of proposals, and phase two will focus on research, development and testing. Only successful applicants from phase one will be able to take part in phase two. 

Earlier this week, the government announced plans to ban the sale of pre-packaged bituminous house coal and wet wood in a bid to curb particulate matter (PM) emissions.

The pledge was a major part of the Clean Air Strategy, published a year ago, which stated that solid fuels currently account for around 39% of all PM pollution in the UK. By comparison, industry and road transport contributes 16% and 12%, respectively.

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