Meet TZOA
A wearable that helps you breathe cleaner, healthier air
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
What’s Inside?
A high-tech optical laser that measures the physical particles that are in the air around you. Both those you can see with the naked eye, and ones that are so small you don’t even know they exist.
TZOA is not a one-trick pony, we have carefully selected 5 sensors that give you a more holistic picture of your environment.
TZOA App: 3 Simple Interactions
We use
Bluetooth to send and share data to your smartphone. Once TZOA is connected to your smartphone, our iOS or Android apps 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
Real-Time Air Quality Report
TZOA takes data from your immediate environment in real-time and turns it intoactionable recommendations; such as 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).
Your Daily Digest
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 the future.
Crowdsourced Maps To Plan Your Day
TZOA empowers you to become a citizen scientist. You will play an important role inbuilding 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.
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; if you have more data you can help to manage your condition and enjoy the air once again.
The Technology
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 any unwanted particulate matter from entering the chamber just like in a clean room in order for us to conduct proper testing and refine our algorithms.
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.
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!
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.
Research Device
We’ve partnered with researchers from Universities across North America to build a device just for them. Current devices for researchers are bulky, dumb, and expensive – we wanted to fill the gap in an affordable and effective form factor.
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 whole new studies to be done.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.