In July 2020, just as #Singapore was starting to open up after the #CircuitBreaker, the National Research Foundation of Singapore decided to fund projects that would look at life in the new normal - opening up while mitigating #COVID19

2/ I was then working @CREATE_NRF, with Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore ( #BEARS) and we were fortunate enough to be funded for our idea

3/ "AUTOMATED DECONTAMINATION OF WORKSPACES USING UVC COUPLED WITH OCCUPANCY DETECTION"
The idea was, UVC can harm occupants but over the past years, occupancy sensing has also improved by leaps and bounds

4/ So, why not put them together to be able to use UVC and completely avoid occupant exposure? It is like a room lighting system, except this time, the lights turn off, just before you enter the room

5/ Thanks to the NRF funding, we ( @FedericoTartar1, @ZuraimiSultan @jiayuliaq, #StefanoSchiavon of @UCBerkeley) completed a working demo of safety and efficacy https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.12581.pdf

6/ And since the work was publicly funded, we also decided to open source the whole project https://github.com/CenterForTheBuiltEnvironment/rpi-uv-controller

end/ We hope others can use our work and maybe even try to build on it for safe, efficient systems. Note, we did not have the facilities to deal with viruses so testing (to be reported later) involved environmental bacteria and fungi.

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