IAQng / Indoor Air Quality Next Generation

The next frontier in clean air is indoors.

Indoor air quality, or IAQ, is usually treated as a set of building readings. IAQng, short for Indoor Air Quality Next Generation, starts from a bigger premise: rooms are living systems shaped by air, people, service, and context.

IAQng is sponsored by SpaceBot and published as an editorial and research initiative: a public argument, source base, toolset, and field map for researchers, advocates, operators, and facility leaders who want shared rooms to be healthier before the next crisis makes the gap obvious.

Read the manifesto See the room model Try the risk model Plan interventions

Manifesto

We should not wait for the next outbreak to treat rooms like health infrastructure.

The central claim is simple: most exposure happens indoors, but most buildings still manage indoor air as background conditions instead of live health infrastructure.

For most of history, people understood clean air only after its absence became impossible to ignore. We gathered around fire, lived with smoke, built cities around coal, sealed ourselves into factories, schools, hospitals, offices, airports, and waiting rooms, and then treated the air inside those spaces as if it were neutral. Invisible. Assumed. Someone else's problem.

But air was never neutral. Air carried combustion, chemistry, moisture, dust, pollen, microbes, human breath, cleaning residue, building materials, outdoor pollution, and the operational habits of the place itself. Air was the first shared service in every building, long before anyone called it indoor air quality.

The history is not one story. It is a series of moments when invisible air became operationally visible: nursing practice made ventilation part of care, the 1918 influenza pandemic made crowding and fresh air urgent, the Great London Smog helped turn outdoor air into law, Legionnaires' disease and sick building concerns made buildings part of the investigation, and COVID-19 forced shared indoor air back into public view. The deeper history tracks the legislation, standards, outbreaks, technology, institutions, and research that made shared air a practical responsibility. 3 17 1 24 7

Read the clean-air history

The paradox of modern environmental health is that we built an outdoor air-quality system for a species that lives indoors.

EPA estimates that Americans spend about 90 percent of their time indoors, where concentrations of some pollutants are often two to five times higher than typical outdoor concentrations. 5 Indoor air is shaped by the air exchange rate, building design, outdoor climate, weather, occupant behavior, mechanical ventilation, materials, cleaning products, moisture, and indoor sources. 5

This is not a niche concern. It is where modern life actually happens. A classroom, an emergency department waiting room, a lab, a lobby, a break room, a restroom, an aircraft gate, a senior living common area, and an office floor are all air systems, not static floor plans. They are living environments.

Indoor air is the main exposure environment of modern life. It deserves the same operational seriousness we already give outdoor air.

The IAQng model

Traditional IAQ measures conditions. IAQng explains room risk.

IAQ gives facilities a necessary vocabulary: particulate matter, VOCs, carbon dioxide, humidity, temperature, filtration, ventilation, and source control. But the same reading can mean different things depending on the room, the people in it, how they use it, what service history says, and what is happening outside the building. IAQng organizes those signals into four practical categories: air, people, service, and context. Air conditions and how a space is used usually drive the most exposure risk; service history and outside context change what a reading means and what to do next.

Room health risk What does this room need right now?

IAQng keeps the indoor air signals, then adds room use, service history, and external context so a facility team can decide what to do next.

01 / Air

Indoor air conditions

Particles, dust, VOCs, carbon dioxide, temperature, humidity, and ventilation or filtration proxies.

02 / People

How people use it

People count, density, dwell time, activity, talking, respiratory activity, and utilization.

03 / Service

What happened here

Utilization since last cleaned, verification checks, service records, occupant reports, and recurring issues.

04 / Context

The room and what surrounds it

Square footage, room type, capacity, layout, outdoor AQI, weather, wastewater trends, and local public-health signals.

Output

Prioritize cleaning, inspection, filtration, ventilation, targeted service, or continued monitoring.

Air, people, service, context

The same model that explains risk should guide the next action.

The categories do not change between the model and the operating loop. IAQng uses the same four lenses to understand the room, decide what matters, and verify what changed.

Room context

What is happening in the space?

Supply air

Return / exhaust

Filtration

Moisture / materials

Exposure zone

Breathing / talking

Source, airflow, removal, materials, and time create the exposure context.

People release particles when they breathe, talk, cough, and sneeze. Some droplets fall quickly. Smaller aerosols can stay suspended, build up, and travel with the room's airflow. 9 10 11

Room volume, occupancy, indoor conditions, service history, ventilation, filtration, materials, humidity, and external signals change what the same reading means. 5

Operating loop

What should happen next?

Detect
Contextualize
Prioritize
Dispatch
Verify
Learn feeds Detect

IAQng should not stop at a score. It should help teams detect what changed, contextualize it to the room, prioritize the right intervention, dispatch the work, verify the result, and learn from what happened.

The point is not more dashboards for their own sake. It is a tighter operating rhythm: sense, decide, act, document, and improve.

AirIndoor conditions, ventilation, filtration, dilution, removal
PeopleOccupancy, density, activity, talking, respiratory activity
ServiceCleaning, inspection, dust, moisture, verification history
ContextRoom size and use, outdoor AQI, weather, wastewater, local signals

Connection Air, people, service, and context explain the score and guide the work.

Room readiness example

What changes in a waiting room?

A clinic waiting room is not only a CO2 reading or a cleaning schedule. On a busy afternoon, the same room can become a different operating problem when occupancy, airflow, outdoor air, service history, and local illness signals move at the same time.

IAQng should help a facility team see that pattern early, choose a practical response, and verify whether the room is ready for the next group of people.

Try the room risk model

01 / Signals

The room starts to drift.

Occupancy rises above the usual pattern, dwell time stretches, respiratory activity increases, and indoor particle levels stop returning to baseline between waves of use.

02 / Context

Outside conditions change the choice.

Outdoor AQI is poor because of smoke, so simply increasing outside air may not be the cleanest first move. Filtration, recirculation strategy, and room use matter more.

03 / Action

The response becomes specific.

The team can prioritize filtration checks, targeted service, dust or moisture inspection, temporary room-flow changes, or continued monitoring instead of treating every room the same.

04 / Verification

The next decision gets better.

The record shows what changed, who acted, whether the signal improved, and whether the same room tends to drift under the same conditions.

Interactive tools

Read the room first. Then compare what to do next.

The homepage makes the argument. The tools are where the argument becomes testable: start with the room risk model to see which lens is driving the read, then use the intervention planner to compare practical cadence choices.

01 / Room Risk Model

What is driving risk in this room?

Adjust air, people, service, and context assumptions, then see how each lens contributes to the room read.

Try the risk model

02 / Intervention Planner

How often should the room be reset?

Compare fresh air, filtration, cleaning, inspection, and budget assumptions once the leading pressure is visible.

Plan interventions

Prepared before the next wave

The next pandemic will move through real rooms.

Pandemic preparedness should not live only in national plans and emergency binders. It has to become an everyday building practice.

Pandemic preparedness is often imagined at the scale of nations, laboratories, hospitals, stockpiles, and public-health agencies. All of that matters. But exposure happens locally. It happens in the shared spaces where people wait, learn, work, recover, travel, eat, and talk.

The next pandemic, respiratory surge, or community health event will not wait for buildings to learn how they are being used. It will move through classrooms, waiting areas, break rooms, offices, labs, airports, senior living communities, and high-traffic public spaces.

COVID-19 was the modern proof point. It revealed that the old division between "air quality" and "infection control" was too small for the problem. Respiratory viruses such as COVID-19, influenza, and RSV can build up indoors when people are close together and ventilation is poor. 20 The lesson is not that every room is a hospital isolation room. The lesson is that the air in ordinary shared rooms can shape how public health is experienced and managed.

CDC's ventilation guidance says good ventilation is essential to healthy indoor environments and can reduce viral particles in the air. 7 EPA's Clean Air in Buildings Challenge called on building owners and operators to improve ventilation, filtration, and indoor air quality as part of reducing airborne virus and contaminant risk. 6 ASHRAE Standard 241 moved the building industry toward explicit control of infectious aerosols. 8

Healthcare buildings make the point clearly because they already treat air as part of infection control. CDC's healthcare environmental guidance describes zone-specific indoor air quality requirements, ventilation rates, pressure relationships, and air-change expectations for spaces such as operating rooms, laboratories, diagnostic areas, patient-care areas, and support departments. 21 The next frontier is carrying that seriousness into the non-hospital spaces where exposure also happens every day.

Wastewater data adds another layer of preparedness. CDC describes wastewater data as an early warning system for emerging infections and community trends. 12 CDC's respiratory virus activity pages also note that wastewater can detect traces of infectious diseases circulating in a community, including infections from people without symptoms. 13

IAQng does not need to claim diagnosis to be useful. It does not need to identify people. It does not need to tell an operator who is sick. Its value is different: it gives facilities a privacy-preserving, explainable risk context for the room itself.

Preparedness is not a button facilities press in a crisis. It is an operating practice they build in ordinary time.

That practice is simple to state and hard to do without instrumentation: it is the same detect-to-learn loop, run in ordinary time. It requires better sensing, clearer thresholds, operational workflows, cleaning and inspection capacity, ventilation and filtration support, verification, and a willingness to treat room health as daily infrastructure, not a crisis-only project.

Room readiness is not only whether a space was cleaned. It is whether the room is ready for the people about to use it.

That is the practical promise: exposure, service, and preparedness can be managed in the same place people actually gather.

The work of preparedness is ordinary-time practice: sense, decide, act, verify, and learn before the next surge arrives.

Field map

A working map of the people, standards, tools, and practices moving the field.

IAQng should point outward. The field map is a public index of the researchers, standards bodies, advocates, technologies, operating practices, and public-health signals shaping the next era of indoor environmental health.

Open the full map

01 / Research Healthy Buildings & Aerosol Science

Universities, labs, and researchers changing how shared air and exposure are understood.

02 / Standards Guidance Becomes Practice

ASHRAE, CDC, EPA, public-health guidance, and the operating floor for buildings.

03 / Technology Clean-Air Tools

Ventilation, filtration, air cleaning, UV, controls, sensing, and procurement questions.

04 / Operations Facility Operations & EVS

The workflows that turn standards, signals, and service into everyday readiness.

05 / Signals Context Signals

Room use, maintenance patterns, wastewater, outdoor air, and public-health data.

06 / Advocacy Public Education & Demand

Nonprofits, school-air work, accessibility, clean-air advocacy, and public expectation.

Participate

Help make the map useful.

The point is not to pretend we already know the field. The point is to build a credible map in public, credit the people doing the work, and improve it when someone knows better.

Suggest A Source

Point us to papers, standards, public-health guidance, field reports, or practical resources that belong in the IAQng source base.

Send a source

Nominate People And Organizations

Help us identify researchers, nonprofits, advocates, standards leaders, technologists, and operators moving indoor environmental health forward.

Make a nomination

Improve The Record

If a claim needs more nuance, a source is weak, or an important perspective is missing, tell us. The map should improve as the field responds.

Send a correction

Use the map

Read the thesis, test the model, and map the field.

IAQng is built to connect argument, evidence, and operations. The site is most useful when the manifesto, room model, planning tools, history, and field map are read together.

Read the manifesto Try the risk model Plan interventions Explore the field map

Sources