Speck monitors your home’s air quality.
PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University has developed a small device that monitors indoor air quality in the home. The device, called “Speck,” is no larger than a coffee cup. It is designed to monitor particulate matter as small as PM 2.5—about 1⁄30th of the width of a human hair. The university says that degree of accuracy results from the use of machine learning algorithms. According to Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon Center of the Foundations of Robotics, and a lead developer on the project, such algorithms can recognize and compensate for interference noise in sensor signals at a low cost. The Wi-Fi-enabled device connects with a dedicated website that stores the data and provides analytical tools, including the ability to cross reference home data with readings from federal air monitoring stations. The device is currently being tested in separate projects in the Pittsburgh area.
