NASA found out, that plants clean the air not through their leaves – as everyone would have thought – but actually through the roots. So one of the founders came up with the idea to create a plant pot, that would not only allow the air to pass through the roots, but also make that process even more powerful through the use of the chimney effect.

It then created a very powerful substrate, the airy base and found out which plants are the most effective in turning air pollutants into fresh air. They sell this as a air-purifing system globally. The design of these systems have earned the German Design Award as well as other remarkable Awards.

To prove the effectiveness of the system, they challenged the TÜV Rheinland and Fraunhofer Institute to prove if the system works. It then created and manufactured together with the Fraunhofer Institute and 3S (a leading company in gas-sensing science) a completely new air-sensor, called Airy Sense that would measure several indoor air metrics and store them in a data-backend.

My role

I was CIO/CTO of that company and responsible for everything digital. Including software architecture for front- and backend of the Airy Sense project and the mobile App to control the sensors. Development and implementation was done by a third party agency, which I lead closely.

Additionally I was working on a patent-pending solution to have automated responses to gathered data and act on them, including an interface to a Smart Home System.