Lord Drayson, the millionaire businessman, Labour party donor and former science minister, has released a pollution monitor that he hopes will drive efforts to improve air quality around the world.
The gadget is designed to be carried in a pocket and is powered by a new technology which constantly harvests energy from the ambient radio waves that mobile phone and wireless networks emit. As such, its battery never needs replacing.
It works with a mobile phone app called CleanSpace to record local air pollution levels, and pools the data with that from others to create a high-resolution, dynamic map of pollution hotspots and areas where the air is cleaner.
“We can use this to create a much more detailed map of air pollution across the country and around the world,” Lord Drayson said at the Royal Institution in London on Wednesday. “We want to use this to create a social movement for cleaner air.”
Drayson believes that giving people live readings of local air pollution will alert them to the worst air quality they encounter, and put pressure on councils and governments to clean up the air in their regions.
The £50 CleanSpace tag, as the device is known, records levels of carbon monoxide, one of the many gases released by vehicles that run on petrol or diesel. It has an internal lithium ion battery that is constantly recharged by energy gathered from radiowaves in the air.
Drayson, who lives in London, suffers from asthma, as do four of his children. The condition is exacerbated by air pollution which irritates the air ways. He said air pollution had become one of the most serious threats to public health, an issue made more acute by the recent revelations that VW subverted emissions tests on some of its diesel cars. Air pollution exacerbates respiratory and heart disease, and is responsible for about 2 million deaths a year, according to the World Health Organisation.
Software built into the CleanSpace app works out when people are walking, running or cycling, rather than taking the car, and notches up “CleanMiles”, that users can cash in for rewards, such as bicycle accessories or money off gym membership.
The energy harvesting system at the heart of Drayson’s pollution monitor cracks a problem that scientists have been puzzling over for years. The difficulty has been extracting useful amounts of power from weak radio waves that are nearly always in the air because of mobile phone and other wireless networks.
Drayson Technologies, the firm Lord Drayson runs, worked with Imperial College in London, to create its device, called Freevolt. It uses an antenna to capture radio waves, and an efficient rectifier to convert the alternating currents from the waves into direct electrical currents. A power management system picks out the highest-power waves in the air and locks on to them.
Even so, the FreeVolt device can harvest only a tiny amount of power from the airwaves. At best, it can run a 2 mW electrical device, such as a simple sensor. Drayson sees the technology powering smoke alarms, simple cameras, and even smart bins that know when they need to be emptied.