Science and Technology continue to overwhelm us and have been changing our lives for the better. But a tiny idea coupled with common sense can equally impact our life. One such idea was initiated by Brenda Wallace. Later Brenda, Amber Craig and Hiria te Rangi came together and transformed the idea into a social enterprise, Whare Hauora.
Whare Hauora is a New Zealand based company that is making lives better with Whare sensors. It all started when Brenda’s daughter had to continuously skip her classes because of Asthma. To estimate the their living condition inside the house, Brenda bought a sensor worth $300. But she did not want to buy five of them for all the rooms in their house.
Instead, she invested $30 this time and bought the parts required to build a sensor. She built sensors for all the five rooms and fixed them. Later, Brenda was shocked to learn that her daughter’s room was the coldest in the house when she compared the readings of the sensors in all the rooms. Despite her daughter’s room being the one that receives the most sunshine, she could have never found out that it was the coldest room without the aid of a sensor.
Brenda always believed in “You cant manage, what you can’t measure“.
Brenda and Amber had a small chat and immediately decided to help many other people whose life span was drastically reduced due to their damp and cold homes by allowing them to monitor living conditions. Among those was Hiria Te Rangi’s (co-founder) aunt who died of pneumonia as she lived in a place that had a temperature lower than the international standards for warmth. Since then, the three co-founders pledged to make the lives of other residents better without paying heed to the concept of profits.
Te Rangi affirmed that monitoring humidity level was important, which should ideally fall below 30%. If it exceeds 60% dust mites increase causing allergies and eczema, at this state, moulds grow rapidly and release spores.
Whare Hauora has developed replacement temperature and humidity sensor that uses zigbee which lasts 3 years on one coin battery. Also, they have a prototype sensor, pushes data to the dashboard via the hub and also displays it on a screen . A kit of Whare Hauora has 4 of these sensors and a hub.
They have also used technology to develop an app and partnered with iMoko, MyRivr, University of Otago and Sustainability Trust for medical expertise, access to social service providers and healthy home research.
Also, the social enterprise is charity is helping others take control of their family’s health, by conducting workshops around the Wellington region where attendees are made to assemble the sensors from scratch. This ensures that people exactly know what they are putting in their homes.
Whare Hauora is currently seeking impact investment, and are in discussion with Foundation North and ākina to know if they can work with investment strategy in place. They plan to extend the sensor range and dashboard. They also wish to extend their rebranded Whare sensors to other countries as well.
