VOC

Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are a broad family of gases emitted by building materials, cleaning products, cooking, and human breath. Many are harmless, but some are irritants, carcinogens, or early indicators of disease. The challenge is detecting the right ones at low enough concentrations to be useful.

Our VOC Monitor project explores a bio-based detection strategy, pairing engineered or biologically derived recognition elements with low-cost transducers to build a desktop or wearable monitor. The goal is a device that can flag specific compounds in real time rather than producing a single, opaque total VOC number.

This is one of our newer teams, and a major early task is mapping the available recognition chemistries against the use cases that matter most to a student audience: indoor air quality in residences, lab safety, and personal exposure monitoring.