RESET Viral Index

The challenge

The built environment provides the setting for all of life’s activities: from buildings that include homes, offices, shops; to infrastructure like buses, trains, cars; all the way to the open spaces and the interactions of the people within them.

With increasing urban density, the role of the built environment and its impact on human health and wellbeing continues to grow. Ideally, a building and its surrounding environment should provide healthy conditions like low pollution, sufficient lighting and heating, safe drinking water, and ample fresh air supply; the latter being one of the most critical factors impacting human health and well-being.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, with many homes and buildings around the world having replaced natural ventilation with mechanical heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, due to poor outdoor air conditions, to improve the indoor air quality (IAQ). These systems control the indoor environment and help to remove moisture, odors, smoke, heat, dust, airborne bacteria, CO2, and other pollutants.

One of these pollutants is ‘particulate matter’ (PM), the most famous one being PM2.5. They can remain in the air for some time depending on air quality factors and can penetrate deep inside the human lungs. Moreover, research has shown that the amount of PM, along with the relative humidity and temperature in an indoor space, correlates with the potential for airborne infection inside a building. Fortunately, these select group of parameters are typically already monitored by building operators in real time. Therefore, by improving our understanding of these parameters, we all have the potential to revolutionize our approach to monitoring and control to improve our building’s indoor environmental quality conditions, especially after the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our plan

With estimates that we spend 90% of our time indoors, more of us are wondering how transmissible COVID-19 is inside buildings. Yet, there are currently no means to quantify this. Since the pandemic began, the industry has provided a tidal wave of holistic guidance on operating buildings during the pandemic. What has been lacking is empirical evidence to support building operators in their decision-making.

As engineering consultants with extensive experience in delivering sustainability solutions for green and healthy building worldwide, we understand how important it is to know a building’s potential for airborne pathogen transmission. We partnered with RESET, ‘the world’s first sensor-based and performance-driven data standard for building operations’ to support and advise our clients about their indoor conditions. RESET’s Index for Airborne Infection Potential is an initiative that combines scientific research with real-time results in a standardized and meaningful way to improve on current infection prevention protocols that often do not utilize the monitoring data that is available. This Index will allow real-time assessment of a building’s ability to minimize infection potential from airborne transmission using various parameters. These are parameters that a building can control and measure: levels of PM2.5, temperature, humidity, and CO2 data.

RESET’s Viral Index will support building operators to navigate these pandemic conditions using a reliable guide that reveals the ideal levels of optimization of indoor space to limit the risk of transmission.

Through BEE Sense – our real-time, integrated building management platform that collects, organizes, and analyses a project’s performance data in real time – we can support building operations by monitoring:

BEE Sense has fully integrated the RESET Standards so we can work directly with building operators to determine their RESET Viral Index.