We bid farewell to the year 2021 with exciting news: our COVILED project has been one of the R&D&I projects selected in the CONECTA-COVID call, promoted by the Galician Innovation Agency (GAIN).
COVILED has its origin in the first months of the pandemic, when the need to develop effective disinfection systems arose, which became more pressing as the route of contagion by aerosols was progressively confirmed. In this scenario, CHUAC, through INIBIC and the Professor Novoa Santos Foundation, INSATI, and Photonics4Life (USC), which had been working since 2019 on the design of healthy lighting systems in hospitals, began to conceive new ideas for the development of air disinfection tools, specifically in the use of UV radiation in the C band, which to some extent was the germ of the COVILED project.
Convinced that the response to the health emergency caused by COVID-19, as well as the challenges facing our society in the 21st century, must necessarily involve effective collaboration between different sectors and fields of knowledge, COVILED brought together an industrial company (SETGA), two technology companies (INSATI, WG) and two research organisations specialising in photonic technologies, health informatics and microbiology (USC, INIBIC).
The general objective of COVILED is the design, development and validation of a technological solution to reduce the incidence of infections caused by Sars-CoV-2 transmitted by air. To this end, we propose the creation of an integral system for the intelligent disinfection of air circulating in ventilation ducts through the use of ultraviolet C (UV-C) radiation, combining photonic technologies, IoT and AI.
The aim of this system is to actively implement prevention and mitigation strategies, acting dynamically and in real time on radiation systems based on data received from sensors and other sources of information.
The project started in March 2021 and is scheduled for completion in April 2023.
