 So we're here with Beter here at ID Tech X show. So who are you? My name is Leonardo Santiago and I'm the CTO of Beter. And with Beter what we want to do is a large scale deployment of these devices and we provide the whole solution, the hardware and the software for cities to map air pollution in real time basically. So this one senses pollution? It measures several pollutants and then with the parameters calculated with those pollutants we can calculate an air quality index. With the air quality index which is based on the European directive we can just create this kind of heat map. That's an example of the city of Barcelona, this is where a company is based. You already have it set up? Yes, we already have it set up in the city of Barcelona. It seems like very well positioned, like in a grid kind of city. One of the things we do before making the deployment we have a special geometry disposition. First we calculate in order to optimize the area cover and the number of sensors we do this kind of geometric distribution. So first before installing the nose we know where we're going to stall the nose so that's why they are very aligned and at the end they just move a few meters like 50 meters depending on where we have a straight line. Is it called outdoors? Yes, this is made for outdoor pollution because measuring pollution in doors is fairly simple because the concentrations are usually higher. And one of the main challenges of measuring outdoor pollution is the concentrations are usually low but this deal can be very harmful for your health basically. So what is the blue and the yellow? The yellow is worse in the green? Yes, here you can see the color. It's just like above the healthy range. This is real time? This is real time. Yeah, we get a heat map every 15 minutes. And here you can see for example this is for example you can close this, if you go this is for example in the middle of the night this is like you can see the timestamp 8 in the morning, 7. Well, this is when you start seeing like the high in the traffic in the main arteries of the city. So you have a partnership with Barcelona? What is your company? Our company is based in Barcelona. More than a partnership basically it was for them they wanted to have that as a showcase and it's a complementary system to what they already have like normally the traditional AQM their quality monitoring equipment is very expensive and big and with our solution which is only a fraction of the price they can install hundreds of known instead of for the city of Barcelona they only have 12 and what they do now is to have they use mathematical models in order to extrapolate the pollution all across the city and they can create just a heat map of the average pollution once a month and with our actual measurement we do not need a complex mathematical model because we have many measuring points and then what we just do is to create a heat map every 15 minutes. So it's better to have your solution? Well just because with these cities can actually know how pollution is moving just like during the day every 15 minutes and they can apply more cost-effective solutions for example like moving the traffic or redirecting the traffic to other parts of the city and if they direct the traffic to other parts of the city they can know that actually it's working or it's just causing another problem at another part of the city. So in real time they can understand what traffic is causing what? Exactly, instead of before they were just like assuming that the actions were working and they will narrow like months after they were doing some studies and they have to install their special equipment but with this information they can just know in one day if it's working or not and if it's not working they can just try something else. So is it a gas sensor? Yeah, we use electrochemical sensors to measure some gases or optical sensors to measure particles which is like pollen and dust and also like products from combustion and we also included a noise pollution level so we also know how... it's some sort of microphone exactly so we also know how noisy the city is. Is that all the sensors that will be required in the future? Is it possible that some sensor is missing? That doesn't exist yet or something? Well for what the cities are measuring now we have everything in a single package and also just everything in a very compact package so that's what the cities are wanting to measure now and that's what we have included. If there is any other sensor for example in the next version we're going to include also a UV index so we can also just measure that and besides that we also measure temperature relative humidity and atmospheric pressure and of course this whole data kind of like crowdsourced data and have more reference point that just one meteorological station in one city that can be used also for meteorological purposes for example. And it looks like there's 100 or something in Barcelona. For the city of Barcelona we're just covering the well the main part of Barcelona and we have 136 nodes I think. Nice. So how much is one? The price per node is around 5000 euros and it depends on the number of sensors the city requires. The distance between nodes is between 500 and 700 meters that's what we recommend in order to have a nice resolution heat map. The advantages of all devices is that their battery power the battery lasts for one year and they're completely autonomous and wireless so it's a lot easier for the cities to install these kind of devices instead of when you have to handle only a handful of devices it's easy to install hundreds of devices it's a lot easier just to put them on a street light or street furniture and they just forget about them for one year. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a solar charge? One of the things we wanted to avoid was maintenance at all and also adding a solar panel will include especially for cities that are like close to the sea or they have a lot of dust someone will have to anyways go and clean the panels and that's what we just wanted to avoid at all costs. So now you have to change the battery every year? Yeah, but if you include a solar panel you have to go more often like every two or three months. How many? Yeah exactly it depends a lot on the city but we have a lot of dust now and also like the same particles we're trying to measure they are the same particles that are going to be on top of the solar panels and also it requires a little bit more of a study when you're going to install these you can install them anywhere and when you're going to install something with a solar panel you have to make sure that the sun is going to be actually hitting on that and when you are wanting to install this in a very urban scenario where you have tall buildings then you have to make sure that your sensor is always going to be in a place where the sun is going to get hit by the sun so with this you don't have to worry about that. But right now it's a very long battery life it's very good one year right? Yes. So you wouldn't need to worry about the sun it's so little you need to charge to keep it going for another year. Well yeah but one of the things is also rechargeable the rechargeable batteries are very big in volume so we have a smaller non-rechargeable battery that is very compact and that's how we can also optimize the size of the device because when you're installing this in a city furniture one of the things that city wants especially some connected green cities they want to have something that looks nice on a street post instead of the typical commercial white box that looks kind of ugly. So I think their solutions is... We are a technical solutions it's an engineering company we're based in Barcelona we're based in Barcelona we have a pool of around 16 engineers and last year after working five years with a project last year we decided to create a spin-off to commercialize this product. Is there a lot of competition in this field or not yet? There's a lot of movement in this field one of the things is that it was hard to convince cities when you are trying to give them a solution that is only a fraction of the price of what they normally use for example one full AQM station they just need the whole infrastructure and the devices only to measure one gas the hardware to measure only one gas is between 10,000 and 15,000 euros and you have to add several of those plus it requires maintenance it requires electricity, air conditioning it requires the servers and all the infrastructure with all the buys which is only 5,000 we measure already four gases plus particles and we include the data connectivity and all the data is just in the cloud we also have an open API so cities can offer the data for scientist research or basically cities can do whatever they want with the data once they have it So you're ready now to launch for every city in the world? Yes, basically Exactly, exactly so that's what we are planning on doing now we actually have some notes installed in Central Park in New York and this is just like starting to know how the sensors work also in different scenarios there are also some cities in Spain that want to install our notes already and we are already in the conversations with them to install the notes in these other cities It could be important for people who look for flats and they would be like people who are allergic or want to be in a cleaner area they can look at your map and say I want to live over there, it's cleaner Yes, exactly this is one of the things that having this kind of data could create many new businesses for example, for real estate this is something that eventually is going to happen that they're probably going to take advantage of having this kind of data and also not Electric car company should invest in your technology because there will be a great selling point for saying to the government, we need to switch to Tesla because you can have a proof right now you can say, hey, something like that but this is already what we are trying to do is also to exactly to engage also citizens citizens in order to not to make the car or the car makers to be able to tell them to the city hey, you need to buy Teslas now basically the cities will do and the government, what the government will do is just to apply this kind of regulation for them to basically just stop having like gasoline vehicles coming into the city and only allowing like eco vehicles coming into the city or the most polluted areas in the city