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January Newsletter: Get weekly summary reports and start dismissing alerts

In case you missed it: A round-up of all our latest features in the AirSuite Portal

Brad Christensen, AirSuite Head of Product

22nd Jan 2025

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Welcome back - hopefully you’ve had plenty of time to rest and relax over the holiday period. I’ve just got back from a trip to Christchurch and Methven, so it’s going to take some time for my brain to switch back out of holiday mode!

Before I get stuck into some real work again, I’ve got another round of features to fill you in on below. The one we’re most excited about is the new AI-infused weekly summary report: delivered to your inbox every Monday, it’s all about making information easier to understand and accessible to everyone.

We realised in the early stages of the AI boom that generative AI is sadly not very good at “understanding” granular time-series data, so it’s taken us a while to build something truly useful with it. Now, we think we’ve managed to get all the right elements to come together to make it work: the right model, the right pre-processing, and the right guard rails.

Meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead here at AirSuite: we’ve been getting our new Biochemical sensor add-on ready for prime-time, with the first units being tested in our office this week. And earlier this month, we delivered the first Glance + PM sensors to lucky customers!

Best regards,
Brad and the AirSuite team

Get weekly summary reports

We’ve created a weekly summary report email that will start appearing in your inboxes over the coming weeks. Designed in collaboration with the New Zealand Ministry of Education, one of the primary expected uses of the report will be to inform teaching staff about the performance of their classrooms, so that they have all the information they need at a glance, without the need to engage with the Portal.

In addition to the data you’d expect to see, the report includes low battery alerts, a list of any offline devices, rooms that may have been unoccupied, and an AI-generated description of the room’s performance over the past week (enabled for select customers at launch).

Where the AI shines is in its ability to provide guidance tailored to your context - such as a classroom, a bedroom, or an office space. Since it knows what the room is, it can make suggestions that sound more relevant and personal. We’ve found this to be especially effective at making the information feel more accessible to new users who may not feel confident interpreting the data on their own yet.

You’ll receive your first weekly report in a week or two, and we’re excited to hear what you think! For reports with the AI summary enabled, you’ll be able to give us a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on whether you found it to be useful and accurate or not.

Dismissible alerts for offline devices

Historically, all alerts would disappear when a device goes offline, because we track incoming sensor data within a 12-hour window. This meant that when a device registered a ‘low battery’ alert, that alert would disappear after the device dropped offline, and you’d lose track of it. Now, we have a way of tracking those devices with offline alerts.

With this comes the ability to dismiss those alerts, since offline devices may have been intentionally turned off - such as if you intend to put them in storage for a while, or relocate them to another site.

All other alerts are also now dismissible, including environment alerts (temperature, CO₂, etc) and other diagnostic alerts (low battery, power cable unplugged, etc). An example of how this may be used is that a national property management team could manage the alerts as items to be actioned on a day-to-day basis, with regional managers delegated responsibility to manage alerts for subsets of properties.

Battery life estimates

AirSuite LTE sensors use a special type of high-density battery made to last an exceptionally long time.

The downside to these batteries is their capacity is very hard to measure! In lithium-ion batteries, you can use the voltage to roughly approximate the battery percentage. But in ours, the voltage remains constant over their entire lifespan.

To get around this, we now estimate your battery life based on a complex range of factors, including daily usage, network conditions, and device configuration.

This method of measuring the battery life relies on a lot of assumptions, based on what we’ve measured in the lab. As such, it won’t always be perfect, but it should give you a rough idea of how much life is left in each device so that you have plenty of time to plan for their replacement or plug them in. Overall, we’ve found this method produces good results - consistent with the assumptions we would make if we were approximating battery life with our own eyes.

Please note that if your device has already been deployed for over a year, we may not have enough information about the previous network conditions to produce a reliable indication of the battery life, and we may over or underestimate the current battery percentage as a result.

And more!

• Tags can now be created with timestamps, allowing you to mark the time of an intervention occurring on graphs
• We’ve created a sidebar for all the options on the deployment list page, so you can choose which columns are visible, and see more clearly which filters are toggled
• We’ve added a daily average PM2.5 graph, which better aligns with the WHO’s 24-hour exposure guidelines
• In the organisation settings pages, you can now see the full list of members or devices that belong to nested sub-organisations
• On the Overview page, you can quickly organise your sensors by clicking and dragging to relocate them
• When viewing one or more deployments, there’s a new option to enable automatically refreshing the graphs with new data, which allows you to use it as an auto-updating dashboard
• We fixed a bunch of bugs! One of the gnarliest ones was a problem that caused CSV exports to fail when you tried to run lots of exports at the same time. This should now work reliably, and give you more progress feedback during the export process.

Up next

• Upcoming Biochemical sensor add-on: rolling out to early adopters next month with support for detecting CO, SO₂, HCHO, and NOx. With long life and low cross-sensitivity, this precise gas detection add-on board is designed to complement our existing broad spectrum volatile organic compound (VOC) coverage.
• Cloud-first mobile app: the AirSuite mobile app was historically made just for deploying devices, so it could only display sensor information using a Bluetooth connection, with limited embellishment from the Cloud. But now that you can log into the app with your Portal account, expect to see a whole lot more Cloud capabilities popping up.
• Third-party sensors: next month, we’ll start bringing in data from third-party sensors for one of our key customers, so that they can use the AirSuite platform to view all their data in one place.

If you have ideas you’d like to see implemented, let us know! We’re always keen to hear your feedback.

Best regards,
Brad and the AirSuite team