Awards & Nominations

Air Aware has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist

Purify the Air Supply

Has your time spent indoors increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of stay-at-home and shelter-in-place policies worldwide? Your challenge is to use the International Space Station (ISS) as inspiration and develop a system to monitor and/or purify indoor air. It is entirely up to you whether the system you design is able to be used on Earth (for example in homes, businesses, transportation, etc.) and/or in space.

Biosurveillance seismograph

Summary

Nucleic acid pathogen detection using biosurveillance protection confection. Infection mitigation through filter activation, protecting the nations from another staycation; derived from the science of the international space station.

How I Addressed This Challenge

Concept: Real time biosurveillance using a spooled HEPA capture material.  Air is actively drawn through the filter material, capturing slivers in time, where particles including bacteria, fungi, and viruses adhere to the filter.  The filter material slowly progresses constantly, so a time stamp can be associated with each detected exposure.  

As the HEPA material spool progresses from the aerosol capture element to the biodetection element, a blast of air and liqid releases the captured materials to progress to the automated nucleic acid detection step.  In this step, detergents and microsonication break the cells and viral capsids, releasing DNA, RNA, proteins, and other biomaterials.  The biomaterials are subjected to a quick charged pulses, attracting and focusing the negatively charged nucleic acids to a positively charged loci point for molecular detection via hybridization.  Capture probes to 1,000s of bacterial, viral, and fungal pathogens enable quick scanning for usual suspect pathogens.  In cases where an infection exposure is suspected, but no clear pathogen ID has been made, then this sample is reflexed to full metagenomic characterization on the MinION sequencing platform, on the ISS.  Data is compared to Genbank , NASA Genelab, and other data repositories to identify potential risk microorganisms and viruses.  If a pathogen, or possible pathogen is detected, the Ultra HEPA N99 high airflow purification system is activated, personel notified, and appropriate exposure mitigation immediately put in place.

How I Developed This Project

Inspired from data available from NASA Genelab and work on the detection of environmental microorganisms of JPL scientists and others. Also inspired by the first genomic sequencing experiments aboard the ISS, using the MinION platform, and the immediate needs for mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Project Demo

http://www.stronglab.org/spaceapps

Data & Resources

NASA GeneLab

Genbank

NCBI

GISAID

NEXTSTRAIN

NASA BIOREPOSITORY LIST

SKC Air pump devices

Tags
#air quality
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.