About Happier Air

Happier Air is a smart air monitor & app that helps you see how air quality impacts your health and performance. How?

The the Happier Air Monitor shows a 😊 happy face when air is good and a sad 😟 face when air is bad. The human brain quickly and clearly recognizes images of faces. You can act immediately. No need to interpret numbers or feel the anxiety of red alerts.
The app tells how your air quality is impacting daily activities like sleep in a closed feedback loop system. By connecting with our app to track how air quality impacts your real-time performance and longer-term health, you can see quantitative impact and make informed decisions.

Mission

The mission of Happier Air is to solve the indoor air quality crisis.

World Bank data indicate that 3.7 billion people, about half the world's population, are exposed to more than 50 µg/m³ of PM2.5 on an annual basis, 5x more than many of the findings below.

A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal found that 7.2% of all daily deaths in 10 major Indian cities were linked to short-term exposure to PM2.5 pollution levels .

We're seeing a shift where some hospitals in the UK now including neighborhood PM 2.5 levels on health charts alongside blood type because it is so consequential to disease.

Air Health Crisis

Air quality’s has adverse effects on so many health outcomes and general mortality, it is hard to overstate.

The cost to life optimization is also hard to overstate. Below we list a sampling of studies that show how much poor air quality hurts brain performance and life optimization.

In 1846, doctors did autopsies then delivered babies. They couldn't figure out why mortality rates were so high. We think future people will look back at bad air hygiene like we look at bad hand hygiene.

By 2030, we're going to be talking about the air quality-health crisis in the same way that we talk about cancer today.

Everyone breathes. This is a massive health crisis, impacting everyone in the world that has yet to be acknowledged by mainstream culture.

Brain Health

Mounting evidence shows that poor air quality also hurts cognitive performance.

Most people do not understand the magnitude and seriousness of the air quality health crisis. You can take a look at the Ultimate Guide to Brain Fog and Air Quality if you want to dig deeper. The TLDR is:

Diminished Executive Function: Higher exposure to air pollution correlates with worse performance on cognitive tests.
Poor Word Recall: Studies show that people exposed to higher levels of air pollution struggle more with word recall.
Accelerated Cognitive Decline: Long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with faster cognitive decline in older adults.
More Mistakes When Making Decisions: In 2019, researchers found that for every 10 micrograms of PM2.5 pollution per cubic meter of air, chess players made 1.5% more mistakes. The magnitude of the errors increased by 9.4%.
Strategic Thinking Impairment: A Harvard study found that office workers scored 61% better on cognitive tests in a "green" building compared to an office with normal CO2 and VOC levels.
Higher Chances of Brain Diseases: The more PM2.5 you breathe, the more likely you are to get diagnosed with dementia according to Bishop et al 2018; an extra 1 microgram/decade = 1.68% increase in diagnosis. Breathing those tiny PM2.5 particles in for years ups your risk of dementia by 16% according to a 2019 study linked long-term PM2.5 exposure to brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Faster Brain Aging: Pollution can actually make your brain get older faster. One study in 2013 found that over the long-term, breathing in PM2.5 and PM10 results in your brain aging by 2 years cognitively for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in exposure.
Worse Test Scores: Dirty air is making it harder for people to think straight as they get older, especially for less educated men. A researcher in 2018 found that cleaning up the PM10 pollution to meet EPA standards could boost Chinese people's scores on math and word tests.
Baseball Umpires Blow More Calls: The pollution doesn't just stay in the background - it actively messes with people's decision-making. In 2018, researchers showed that higher CO and PM2.5 levels meant baseball umpires made more incorrect calls during games. According to the results, a 1 ppm increase in 3-hour CO causes an 11.5% increase in the propensity of umpires to make incorrect calls.
Speaking Ability Degrades: A 2019 study found that when PM2.5 levels spiked, Canadian politicians started using simpler language in speeches, like they lost months of education overnight. When PM2.5 was over 15 µg/m³, it caused a 2.3% reduction in same-day speech quality. Equivalent to the removal of 2.6 months of education.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Poor air quality is having a drastic effect on people globally.

Why now?

The air quality health crisis has remained largely invisible for two main reasons: air itself is invisible, and we lack effective tools to measure how air quality affects our performance.

We spend 90% of our time indoors, where air pollution is 2-5x worse than outdoors. This problem can't be solved by public outdoor monitoring stations alone.

Poor air quality impacts every aspect of life, including sleep and exercise. These effects are interdependent and difficult to isolate.

Air quality can cause fluctuations in performance, focus, and energy throughout the day, creating a negative cycle across multiple health dimensions.

While we have effective wearables to measure sleep and exercise, empowering people to understand how their actions impact these areas, we lack air monitors that quantify air quality's impact on health and productivity.

Just as "eight hours of sleep" and "10,000 steps a day" have become common knowledge, we aim to show people how many of their 9,000 daily breaths should be clean air.

Health Air Monitoring

We're defining the category of air health monitoring using real-time space tracking. By putting more power in individuals' hands, we help people make informed decisions about their health and performance based on their own data.

Quantifying the consequences of choices in real-time closes the loop on air quality. We connect specific activities to poor air quality exposure and demonstrate the quantified impact on health or performance.

This empowers sustainable improvement in choices over time.

Enabling people to see how their decisions impact their health gives them agency.

While some bad choices have immediate consequences, it's harder to make lifestyle changes about something invisible like air. However, concrete impacts like sounding less articulate on a Zoom call or scoring lower on exams can motivate action.

That's why we've designed Happier Air to provide quantitative impacts and feedback loops on how air affects the activities you care about.

By leveraging sensors for PM 2.5, CO2, and VOC, our app provides real-time feedback on how air and lifestyle choices impact your health and performance.

Our device is built for the health of your spaces. Constantly connected to WiFi, it feeds your cloud the data needed to make actionable decisions about you in your office or your child in their room.

We've focused on making Happier Air accessible to everyone as a standalone device that works without the app. Simply turn it on, and a smiley face indicates if your air is good or bad.

We exist to help people like you optimize life by breathing happier.