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 a SpaceBot-led public field guide for making indoor air actionable: a sourced map, model, and toolset for understanding room risk and improving shared indoor spaces before the next crisis makes the gap obvious.

Read the manifesto

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.

Shared air usually becomes visible after failure: smoke, outbreaks, sick-building concerns, moisture, crowding, and the moments when buildings become part of the public-health investigation. The history is useful because it shows the same pattern repeating: air becomes governable only after someone makes responsibility visible. 3 17 1 24 7

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 where modern life happens: classrooms, waiting rooms, labs, lobbies, break rooms, restrooms, aircraft gates, senior living common areas, and office floors. They are air systems, not static floor plans.

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 work.

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

Room context

What is happening in the space?

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.

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.

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.

Preparedness is often imagined at the scale of nations, laboratories, hospitals, stockpiles, and public-health agencies. All of that matters. But exposure happens locally: classrooms, waiting areas, break rooms, offices, labs, airports, senior living communities, and other shared rooms where people wait, work, recover, travel, eat, and talk. COVID-19 showed that the old division between "air quality" and "infection control" was too small for the problem. 20

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

IAQng does not need to diagnose illness, identify people, or tell an operator who is sick to be useful. Its value is different: it gives facilities a privacy-preserving, explainable risk context for the room itself, including public-health signals such as wastewater trends when they change building posture. 12 13

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

Sources