PiCO Home, a small white portable box with a single USB Type-C port, is the world’s smallest air quality monitor. Launched by Brilliant and Company, Co. on Indiegogo, it raised nearly US$35,000 and is 960% funded. It’s meant to measure indoor and outdoor air quality, delivering personalized recommendations through an app available for both iOS and Android. It connects with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and is Alexa ready. Its sensors measure particulate matter in the 2.5 to 10-micrometre range (PM 2.5/10) known to impact respiratory systems. It can also measure temperature and humidity, volatile organic compounds, carbon dioxide equivalent, ozone and ultraviolet spectrum. “I suffered from allergic rhinitis since I was young, so I’ve been very sensitive to changes in the temperature, humidity, and exposure to dust and pollutants”, says Ryan Yun, founder and CEO. “Growing up, I’ve always grappled with how people can easily cope with pollutants in the living environment”.

PiCO is not your first device.
While in Beijing, where I lived for a year, I saw many elderly people, children, and respiratory patients suffering from air pollution there. That observation shocked me and was perhaps the turning point where this all started. And so our first product, Bandi, a smart fine dust detector, was launched to empower others to know about the invisible danger of inhaling dangerous air. It received a great market response in Korea and thus, inspired us to be better. A lot has happened since Bandi first debuted. We've continuously sought ways to improve the functions and design of our products and services. Now, we have our 3rd generation product, PiCO Home.

There’s a lot of talking about home air pollution in Asia, but not so much in Europe.
East Asian countries such as Korea and China are experiencing terrible air pollutions lately. The most dangerous particulates, PM 2.5, has been exceeding the 100ug/m3 levels, which is hazardous for health, during spring and winter. So, the media there has been dealing with this issue as one of the hot topics published every day. As a result, people in this region become more interested in air quality more than ever before. The inadvertently led to the increased in sales for air purifiers. Recently, I've read in the news that the sales volume of air purifiers in Korea has increased by more than 70% compared to previous years. Even for me, I live in a small house, but I have multiple air purifiers for each room.

Are our homes so polluted?
Believe it or not, the indoor air that we breathe is 2 to 5 times worse than outdoors according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Our home may not be as safe as we think! As the world becomes more developed and people spending more time indoors, indoor air pollution has slowly become a very, but often overlooked, health issue. Data from the World Health Organization says that 4.5 million people a year on average die from hazards caused by indoor air pollution. That is a staggering 400 deaths a day.

What are the data that you track?
PiCO Home monitors real-time data such as PM2.5, PM10, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon dioxide (CO2), the temperature, and the humidity. These are the most important data in the living environment. We collect and analyze the data in the cloud.

Do you plan to use this data to track the air condition globally?
Not only do we track indoor air quality in real-time but we also use it to track and analyze this data. Doing so helps us make our products better so that people's living environment can be more comfortable and healthier. Another important mission of tracking the air condition is to develop a system that preliminarily forecasts the global outdoor air quality through data analysis. This can then give alerts in advance to our users when outdoor air quality suddenly becomes bad.

Who's the customer of PiCO Home?
People who are suffering from respiratory and skin diseases like asthmatic, atopic and allergic rhinitis, and families who want to raise their kids in a healthy living environment. However, the beauty of our latest product, PiCO Home, is that it is small, compact, light, and powerful, so it can be used by anyone, anywhere, for whatever purpose they may have to live in a healthier and pleasant living environment.

How does the integration with Alexa work?
When you talk to Alexa, it will inform you of the overall indoor air quality and provides solutions to make your air quality better, if it’s not good. For example, if other indoor air metrics are generally good but humidity is low, it will tell you: “Turn on the humidifier because the air of the room is dry. If there's no humidifier, you can leave a wet towel or laundry in the room”.

How did you develop the app? 
Our app developers and designers are doing their best to improve the UI/UX of the mobile app. For now, the current Version 1.0 of the app has limited functionality in terms of Bluetooth connectivity and has difficulty calibrating indoor and outdoor air quality. We are currently developing a completely redesigned and refreshed Version 2.0 that solves many existing problems in Version 1.0. It will improve the UX interface. 

PiCO Home works outdoor. This is an interesting option. Why did you include it?
User feedbacks are very important in our product planning. One of them is portability. We’ve found that people do not only want to monitor the air quality indoors at their home or in the office, but also in various places like the library, in the subway, at construction sites, or in the car. The main feature that enables PiCO Home to be used outdoor is available using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In places that normally don’t have Wi-Fi, users can monitor and collect real-time air quality data using Bluetooth with their smartphone.

Everybody should have a tracker like yours at home. Don't you think that the entry price is the problem? Many people in Europe, for example, take for granted that home air is clean.
Contrary to popular belief, the air indoors is always worst than outdoors. Why? Because some places like the garage or the attic at home have never been ventilated for ages. The kitchen, for example, has the worst air quality at your home whenever we cook, with PM 2.5 levels jumping into the red zones (dangerous, or hazardous). The living room, as another example, could have plenty of hair dust and paint smells (VOCs) that never left the room. The garage can also be dangerous from poorly sealed chemicals or varnished that are not properly ventilated. As for the price, PiCO Home costs US$149, which pale in comparison to two things. The first, it’s a worthy investment, to prevent rather than to cure, for those who have to pay high medical expenses due to diseases caused by indoor air pollution. The second, it’s very inexpensive compared to other indoor air quality monitor in the market, many which are more expensive, less portable, and do not measure all the chemicals PiCO home is capable of. Indeed, backers from the EU are second only to the backers in the US. Why? Because many people in the EU have doubts about their home's air quality and believe it to be a worthwhile, affordable investment for a long-term healthier quality of life.

Do you plan to do an air purifier?
We don't have plans for air purifiers yet. When the time comes, we’ll consider it. For now, our focus is to make our product smarter and more efficient so people can live, play, and work in a more healthy and pleasant environment!