There are so many things that Covid has made us alert to and in the latter part of the pandemic, air quality has become a hot topic. Insight@DCU’s Dr Aoife Morrin was an early voice on this. She spoke to The Irish Times’s Dr Claire O’Connell about it back in May of 2020.

“Every researcher in the world is looking at COVID and how its impacts their research. We are no different,” says Dr Aoife Morrin of Insight at DCU, who was in the serendipitous position of having multiple air quality sensors already installed in Irish homes before the lockdown started.

“We were already involved in a project to monitor home air quality and to capture data around the emissions created by domestic activities such as cooking and cleaning,” she explains. “Then lockdown happened and everyone was suddenly at home, the weather wasn’t warm and the windows were closed. We started to see unusual activity on our sensors. What the sensors were telling us was that, just by virtue of being home more, we were seeing a decrease in the air quality.”

You can read more in The Irish Times here.