DLD Video
The Urgent Invisible
Technology can help detect normally invisible dangers to humans and the planet. Health startup Poppy has developed a system that identifies bacteria and viruses that surround us in offices or homes. Kairos Aerospace, meanwhile, specializes in finding methane leaks to combat climate change.
This DLD Munich session brings together Poppy CEO Elizabeth Caley, former MIT researcher Kevin Slavin, now also with Poppy, and Kairos Aerospace founder Ari Gesher to illustrate how both groundbreaking technologies work.
“Because there’s so much time we spend indoors, 90 percent of our time, we’re going to breathe in the next 24 hours about 10,000 liters of air”, Elizabeth Caley notes. “And what’s in it? What’s living in it?”
Infection-Resistant Buildings
Through sensors and data analysis her company’s “biosafety intelligence system” constantly analyzes the air quality and identifies potentially harmful bacteria and viruses.
The Covid pandemic has given this work additional urgency, Caley emphasizes. “We’re going to need the tools and the ability to take actions based on real data to make [indoor] spaces safe.”
Analyzing the air can even help detect pathogens on surfaces, she explains. Her company’s goal is to work with real-estate companies to create thousands of infection-resistant buildings, as Caley calls it.
“Because if that’s the infrastructure that we have”, she says, “nobody will be worried about breathing indoors again.”
Low Effort, High Impact
Similarly important is detecting methane leaks outdoors because methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
On the upside, methane also removes itself from the atmosphere much faster, Ari Gesher explains. “All you have to do is put less in the atmosphere, and the level goes down again, on its own.”
And because methane is such a strong accelerant, “it’s a place of low effort and high impact to mitigate climate change”, Gesher argues.
By observing oil and gas fields, and analyzing the airspace above, Kairos Aerospace has mitigated the equivalent of 4.2 million cars taken off the road in the past two years alone, Gesher says.
“So this is having a real effect”, he emphasizes. “That said, we need to scale it up to a global scale to have a really big effect.”
Ari Gesher
Kairos Aerospace
Ari Gesher is the CTO of Kairos Aerospace, a startup focused on reducing atmospheric methane emissions from oil field infrastructure. His team oversees the software and data engineering that makes these technically-complex, highly-automated operations possible.
Kevin Slavin
Poppy
Kevin Slavin is Head of Creative and Marketing Poppy, a groundbreaking pathogen sensing and detection network. Previously he founded the Playful Systems group at MIT Media Lab and was founding editor of the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press).
Elizabeth Caley
Poppy
Elizabeth Caley is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Poppy. Poppy is the world’s first commercially available pathogen sensing and monitoring network that helps protect the places where we work, live, and visit by monitoring air and surfaces for the COVID-19 virus and 1,000+ other pathogens.