 Most of the big IOT projects I've done have been with teams of people and small teams but with a commercial sponsor that's been paying for all of it so we're able to kind of do it a bit more properly but this one was one we dreamt up in a pub one day and it took a while to get it off the ground because basically we hadn't got any funding and we were all busily doing other things. But I think it's interesting to see what happens when you do a project on a shoestring and in fact whether you can get it all the way through to survival and so that's why I picked this one to talk about today. I don't know anybody here is unaware of the dangers of pollution in cities of people wondering about if you're not you need to read the paper but about every day we get a story like that. You know this particular one was about deaths as it was another one about infections two days ago in about every week you get one of these and typically they're well supported by scientific evidence and so the question then is what we're going to do about it. Now the official monitoring systems that exist in cities at the moment in London is the one I was thinking about because it's where the problem is worse. These official monitoring systems of a quite good you know that in terms of what they look at which which different pollutants they detect how accurately they detect them and what kind of thing. But they're very expensive to run and if anything they're you know they're not not dense like I think 28 nodes in the central London area that the monitoring pollution at the moment. And if anything that's number is going to go down because of the cost of running that equipment and the fact that it's always a ball that's been batted back and forth between government and different parts of government as far as who's going to pay for it and who's going to look after it. So so that was one problem but the other problem was it doesn't actually tell you what's happening where you're specifically walking so if you walk down a main thoroughfare like the manager Mariloban Road. You are highly exposed if you walk two or three blocks over you might be in fact in an area that's relatively low might be something like 10% of the pollution intensity that you get on the main thoroughfare. So it seemed to us that that we could do a couple of things one of them just wait forever and hope that the government fixes the problem. You know we have had various suggestions like well ban or transport from from London that's a nice one and another one was get rid of cycle lanes because they they cause the traffic to go more slowly and therefore increase pollution. So actually we kind of projected all of those things and we so what we'd like to do is to have the for a an individual that's moving around in a city to have the ability to know what their exposure is right here in now where they are. And also over a route that they might take say a route taking one child to school and wheeling the other one in a push chair. How that route compares with another route that was possibly a little bit longer possibly quite a lot longer but also possibly quite a lot safer. So we wanted a mobile personal pollution device and so we put together a little team of people and a couple of attempts. We actually managed to get some funding in fact out of innovate UK and that was all we got out of them a little bit of funding very little of any kind of useful supervision. But we did also get as a couple of sponsors who wanted to chip in a bit to so it made it possible to do the first phase of the project. So in terms of summarising the objectives for the project the thing had to be accurate enough that it would be credible. There's no point in having collecting data which people are just going to say that's not valid and doesn't reflect the reality. So it needs to be that needs to be portable enough people could move around with it. We also anticipated that will people be worried about the privacy of the of the data because essentially identifies where they are. I mean you again you can obfuscate it but if anybody is really wanting to know where a person was with one of these devices you know we would need to build that level of security into the system. And we wanted it to function in real time so any point you could see where you what your exposure was and the person most difficult one of all was to make it affordable. But there we you know we felt there was some compromise there and by building prototypes and evaluating we would get closer to what that compromise should be. So on the first again because you know on quite tight budget we put together this box basically tough acrylic case bolted together and inside all off the shelf components so we didn't we didn't build any PCBs for this the whole thing was built out of off the shelf stuff. And in order to get ship the data up to the sky in real time we we use Bluetooth and a phone. We obviously had to have an AP you know database and an API and a website and apps so it's a complete end to end thing in order to get a demonstration of the concept. And on the website we would show the roots that people had taken and what the intensity was like. Oh actual size actual size about that actual size. And actually that's a very good question because too big too heavy too much hassle with all the got to make got to charge it up got to have some data bandwidth in your account available all that kind of thing. Actually we kind of knew about all of this beforehand and Claire's book hadn't been published but we'd read other books like it and so we knew we were kind of heading for this but definitely we discovered size matters so although we did a quite a useful first trial if we were going to get anywhere with it we had to keep going. Now we then another thing happened which is quite interesting with innovate UK decided they wanted people to be playing around with Laura one and it occurred to us actually that when you take away the phone and you substitute that with Laura one for your real time coms you actually simplify the the UX so we thought well okay this will take us another step forward towards the usable product even though the Laura one. You know installation that you really need around any city but in particular London isn't there yet now that actually shows what what they have at the moment in the London network. And interestingly it looks like they're going to build it out a bit partly because people like us say it's just not enough we know we're not going to do anything with that. As it turned out a lot of our trial is when the southern part of London so that that was that but you know it there were lots of interesting things and I've got time to really do a whole thing on on Laura one but there's lots of good stuff about it and there's some quite concerning stuff probably the most concerning thing is the way that they hadn't implemented the standard properly. So that pretty crucial bit which is the top level of the security stack is basically doesn't exist in their implementation. So it means that you really haven't got a secure network right now the good news is that they could fix that if somebody wanted to pay them to do so. Where then is whoever the contractor is it's running the the Laura network. But you know so in terms of good things well it's there's a lot more coverage there than you then you have with TTN I love TTN but it coverage is not not good. So yeah a couple of other things like microchip was one company that was supporting the program they were very helpful they provided bits of kit that that we particularly liked to use in the prototyping process and we did a little mini trial and we showed that as you cross cross Laura one nodes you know you could get continuity and things would basically work quite nicely. There's also a trial lined up in Cambridge where they have another installation more recent and more dense actually but we don't want to do another trial with the same kit because it's just yeah too much of a pain. Oh yeah this sometime when we've got time we need to actually implement that top level of the Laura one architecture so that we get the proper key provisioning that's that's in fact confidential between the the two ends of the system the proper end to end encryption. So but right now you can't you if you want that you've got to write all that provisioning separately because it doesn't come with the networks that are currently installed. So you know the this is where the real pain comes in in kit like this made with these and you know with standard components and stuff is that it's very hard to try and iterate your design and you putting additional pieces in there it's very hard to keep going without wasting huge amounts of time. You know we had units that have been we'd have the lid off about six times before we got it all working properly. You know we found that the edges were virtually ungluable because of the quite strong acrylic plastic we were using and so retrofitting was was hard but nevertheless we got some stuff done with it. In terms of precision and I mentioned we needed it to be accurate enough at the moment it seems to be a general idea amongst various people involved in atmospheric chemistry at the sort of academic level that there there are solutions around these kind of this kind of level of sensors so these are not the same ones in your kitchen ceiling that tell you. You're about to die because your carbon monoxide level is out through the roof. These are fairly commercial grade sensors but nevertheless they're somewhat economical compared to some of the very big stuff that the official systems have. But you know without a continuous calibration and various other things in the system you wouldn't get the accuracy that we needed so you know again we have to some more work needs to be done on that. Actually the comms thing is fairly straightforward we found that we could build the standalone version with the Laura stack in the box and that's fine and we could have the alternative as you moved outside the Laura coverage area of pairing up a phone and using it in the way we had in the first trial. So that was all fairly good actually no real problem there. Some components that we used I think that a champion component is this little this is a NRF 52 Nordic chip with a little antenna on a little subboard which is good because it comes with certification. I mean it was also a pretty powerful device and it has barely integrated so that that will be the final device as far as the Laura chip will probably continue with this microchip one and any reason not to and then if we if we need to have. Either GSM or GPS for using those this was a board that microchip provided to us during the trial for development and we can't use it in the actual device because it's too big it's Arduino size but it was nevertheless a very interesting board to have. I noticed that Michael's enjoying his as well he's probably hold it up in a minute. OK the simple build now that we're now working on with all the sensors stuff on one board so there's no more individual sensor boards glued together no more wires going between them and the comms board just basically sits on top of that. This one that you're seeing here is not got the sensors plugged in but they were the same ones that were in an earlier picture. And so with those the board separate board for the comms options you can either populate that back to the original idea of GSM with a phone or standalone GSM or Laura Wan. Or a kind of dual mode which which does more than one thing depending on how you set up in software. So that's the second trial packaging that we're working on at the moment fairly slowly because yes certain amount of conflicting activity commercial work is getting in the way. But we can get it into a sensible box it's going to look a bit like a smaller than a dom jolly phone but still a sensible size package. And also getting rid of the cabling by using as I hope we haven't confirmed it yet but I'm hoping we'll be able to use wireless charging as well. So you literally have this thing on the table. Let's say you are going out with a young child in a pram then you've got the child in one hand you pick the thing up stuck in the back of the pram and off you go. So that's the kind of vision of how that will work. Right. So now we get to the really difficult bit which is how do we do we just say OK this was an interesting academic experiment we think it was kind of fun and right off into the sunset or do we try and make it into a product. And this is where we've got several quite difficult challenges. And I think the first one is that we really don't have enough of a team to take it forward. We're especially short of someone with a more commercial kind of bent who would develop partnerships and all that kind of thing. And so we haven't got that person at the moment. As far as the business model I think we've got various straff to business models which we can show to people and discuss but again that needs to be backed up with more concrete partnerships when we need some funding for things like trials and calibration testing. And he probably well I don't think it's the biggest one but you know I've done a few startups before we would have to actually start a company otherwise this thing would not be sustainable whether it was for profit or not. It doesn't it needs to function like a commercial organization if it's going to be have a life of its own and then of course we'll need to make a production version. Of the of the casing. So that's that. So I'm coming coming to the end apart from a bit of time for questions but where we what we need now is we're still as always looking for potential people to trial the thing. And of course unfortunately they have to be if we want to do the law based trials they have to be in areas with coverage. But we've got some some connections in Cambridge that are going to help us with that. And and the trial partners would say we have had some help up to now with from Bupa and from and also from an insurance company and those are the kind of partners that we need to make the trial more credible. And and that co-founder I mentioned. And so that's that's really why we are so if anyone has any suggestions or ideas for moving that forward then please let me know.