If you suffer from asthma or allergies, you can use TZOA to help manage your condition and enjoy the air once again.
TZOA uses internal sensors to track your environment throughout the day, providing you with real-time information, city-wide mapping, and a daily review. Recommendations will help to change behaviors and improve your quality of life.
What People Are Saying
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Your Air Matters!
Why did we build TZOA? The World Health Organization has found that 7 million people die prematurely every year from air pollution.
The air can be worse inside your home than outside (2-5X worse on average). You spend the majority of your life in your home, we all have the right to know if its a safe environment.
If you suffer from asthma or allergies you're already greatly affected by the air you breathe; with the information we provide, you can help manage your condition and enjoy the air once again.
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What's Inside?
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TZOA contains a high-tech optical laser that measures the amount of physical particles in the air around you, both those you can see with the naked eye, and the ones that are so small you don't even know they exist.
The ultra-fine particles that we detect contribute to serious respiratory and cardiac issues when breathed in, as well as aggravate asthma and allergies.
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We have carefully selected 5 sensors that give a holistic picture of your environment. Context is very important for air quality detection.
TZOA App: 3 Simple Interactions
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We use
Bluetooth to send and share data to your smartphone. Once TZOA is
connected to your smartphone, our iOS or Android app will visualize your
environment and give you full access to the data you collect.
The TZOA app provides a real-time air quality report, a daily digest of your environmental exposures, and crowdsourced air quality maps.
1. Real-Time Air Quality Report
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TZOA takes data from your immediate environment in real-time and turns it into actionable recommendations to keep you healthy.
For example: opening your windows for ventilation, choosing less polluted routes, and making sure you are getting enough sunshine during the winter (and not too much in during the summer).
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2. Your Daily Digest
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Open up the TZOA app at the end of the day to see your daily exposure levels. Your daily digest knows where you were located, the average air quality in each area, and how much time you spent there. It then provides recommendations.
This information allows you to investigate what happened throughout the day, good or bad, and helps form behavioral change for tomorrow.
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3. Crowdsourced Maps
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TZOA empowers you to become a citizen scientist. You will play an important role in building air quality
maps of entire cities and countries, all the way down to your local
neighborhood. With family, friends and fellow TZOA-users, we can all come
together and build something that makes a difference.
You can use these maps to plan your route
to work, avoid areas with reported allergens, decide where to have a picnic with your family, as well as
using the data to promote social change.
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The Technology
Our optical air quality sensor detects PM (Particulate Matter) 2.5 and 10. These are tiny particles floating in the air that cause permanent damage to our lungs. Our sensor incorporates a 630nm (red) laser along with a photodiode to capture the light intensity and determine the amount of particles as well as their size.
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This is our
custom-built test chamber which allows us to compare our sensor to reference devices that are worth $2,000-$20,000+. We use an industrial HEPA filter which prevents unwanted particulate matter from entering the chamber in order for us to conduct proper testing and refine our algorithms.
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This graph compares the TZOA sensor to a $3000 TSI DRX sensor. We've done 3rd party testing that shows a great .9253 R-squared (correlation) value.
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Below is a close up of one of the peak events across multiple sensors.
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Here is a scatter plot showing our R-squared value against the TSI DustTrak.
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Our circuit boards are
black. Why? With a laser inside and a photo-diode to collect the light, we had to reduce reflectivity within the device
itself. As an
added bonus, we think it looks pretty cool!
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What you see above is our current device for researchers. Our next stages are shrinking the technology into the smaller consumer TZOA design and further improving the algorithms and software.
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Research Device
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We've partnered with researchers from Universities and organizations across North America to build a device just for them. Current devices for researchers are bulky, dumb, and expensive.
Our goal was to create a smart device that is affordable and has a miniature form factor, and we're confident that we succeeded. You be the judge!
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The research device features:
-Bluetooth communication and data extraction
-Double capacity battery
-Data logging with removeable SD card slot
-Micro-USB port for constant power and data extraction
-Higher quality components for better accuracy/sensitivity
-More ruggedized design
-Configuration panel that enables access to device settings such as logging frequency, calibration values, sleep mode, and fan power.
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In June, ten of our research devices are participating in a study in conjunction with the University of British Columbia. They will be taken to India where local volunteers will use them to track their personal exposure to particulate pollution. This is a brand new way of doing air quality research and our technology will allow for new studies to be done with larger deployments and personal exposure tracking.In addition, the researchers we are working with are helping us improve our technology to prepare for our consumer TZOA device for you. You will be using the same technology that researchers around the world use for scientific studies!
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Our Team
We've built a strong team comprised of people who have been in the
trenches before and know what they're doing. We have built large-scale
products, grown companies from the ground up, and we're all very
passionate about what we do.
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Being based out of Vancouver and San Francisco, we were inspired to make a difference in the world
and TZOA is the way to do it. Join our team and let's do something
unprecedented in order to make the world a better place.
For both our prototyping and manufacturing, we have partnered with MistyWest, an engineering design consultancy with a broad range of experience.
MistyWest develops products that combine the best of function and aesthetics with a focus on new technologies. The multi-disciplinary team at MistyWest includes mechanical, electrical and software engineers along with industrial designers that are working closely with the Tzoa team to help make bring this innovative product to market.
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Our Mission
Our mission is to create a social movement for environmental change. We believe awareness leads to advocacy, which leads to action - helping perpetuate innovation and green technology.
With TZOA, we want to bring air quality data to every person on Earth - whether you're concerned about the air in your home, on your commute, or in your community.
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How do I contact the team?
Please feel free to reach out to us at info[at]mytzoa.com and someone from the team would be happy to get back to you.
Timeline of Engineering:
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We are planning on doing all of the R&D and the majority of manufacturing in North America. We think it's important to stick by our own environmentally friendly principles and do this the right way. We will also implement a recycling program for our devices before they are shipped.
We use
Bluetooth to send and share data to your smartphone. Once TZOA is
connected to your smartphone, our iOS or Android app will visualize your
environment and give you full access to the data you collect. 
