Biohacking Your Building: How Tech Can Improve Health and Wellness

In 1991, eight scientists sealed themselves inside Biosphere 2, a 3.14-acre glass-and-steel structure in the Arizona desert. The ambitious experiment aimed to prove humans could sustain themselves in a closed ecological system, potentially paving the way for space colonization. Earth was considered Biosphere 1, and this would be humanity's first attempt at creating a second.

Within months, the carefully controlled environment began to fail. Carbon dioxide levels soared. Oxygen plummeted. The "Biospherians" became irritable, splitting into hostile factions. Some secretly broke quarantine protocols. After two years of declining physical and mental health, the experiment ended in controversy when team members opened the airlock doors, contaminating the sealed environment.

The experiment became the butt of jokes. There was even a satirical movie made about the experiment called Bio-Dome (I’ve never seen it, and it has a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m not officially recommending it).

The moral of the story: the quality of our indoor spaces can have a mammoth impact on our health and wellbeing, yet the majority of us go about our days ignorant of the quality of our spaces.

Biohacking Comes to the Built Environment

We first heard the phrase “Biohacking Your Building” from Erin McDannald, CEO of Elevated, who develops a space automation platform focused on the quality of indoor environments.

"For me, biohacking a building is modifying the built environment to optimize human biology performance and resilience," said McDannald.

The Elevated team discovered this firsthand during their return to the office after the pandemic. Armed with Oura rings to track their health metrics and a fully-sensored building to monitor environmental conditions, they created a company-wide experiment to see how the office environment could impact health and productivity. This real-world experiment launched a five-year journey into what McDannald calls "biohacking your building"—applying the same data-driven optimization that biohackers use on their bodies to the spaces where we work. (More on the results of this experiment later…)

Step One: Stop Making Buildings Worse for Humans

Before dreaming of productivity-boosting environments, most buildings need to address a more fundamental problem: they're actively making people worse.

"Our buildings are all in a terrible state," says Nicholas Napp, founder of Nosy, a startup developing affordable indoor air quality monitoring. "The buildings are so bad in terms of their ability to just do the basics like temperature control, humidity control. Most buildings currently fail at that because they don't have the data."

The numbers back this up. Our Untapped 87% Whitepaper grounds us in the reality that only 13% of small-and medium-sized buildings have a building automation system, and that means the majority of our spaces don’t have the tools to improve indoor environments effectively.

Nosy is in the prelaunch stages of their Bluetooth mesh-connected multi-sensors that measure temperature, humidity, light levels, CO₂, VOCs, occupancy, and more, transmitting data every five minutes to a local hub and cloud platform. Their goal is to provide facility managers with quick, actionable insights, especially those without sophisticated systems. 

“If we can make an incremental improvement that people can actually afford to do, it’s worth it, even if it might be a little bit baling wire and string,” says Napp. The Nosy system is going to focus on making data actionable for a team with a small budget. It doesn’t have to be a system overhaul: it can start with adding a humidifier or fixing a broken thermostat for most building owners. If you have actionable insights from real data, the first steps become manageable.

Healthy Spaces Make Smarter People

This isn't just about comfort;, it's about cognitive function. JJ Baird, VP at Airthings, points to groundbreaking research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Harvard's CogFx study. When CO2 levels hit 2,500 ppm (not uncommon in poorly ventilated conference rooms) people's performance on basic strategy tasks approaches dysfunction. Add in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter, and the cognitive impact compounds.

Airthings develops air quality sensors and a platform to help people stay healthy while improving energy efficiency within buildings. "One of my favorite case studies," Baird shares, "involved a customer where people were having headaches in the office. They couldn't smell or see anything wrong. We looked at the Airthings data and saw that, throughout the winter, every time the temperature increased, VOC levels spiked at exactly the same time."

The correlation that Airthings was able to draw with their sensors indicated the VOC issues were coming from the HVAC system. They discovered an uncapped test port was sucking in exhaust air from the heating element and distributing it throughout the building. What could’ve been chalked up as unexplained headaches became a simple fix once they had the data to identify them.

The Humidity Factor: An Overlooked Health Threat

While CO2 and VOCs get most of the attention, humidity might be the silent killer of workplace wellness. Baird and the Airthings team commonly reference a study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information that shows that airborne-transmitted infectious bacteria and viruses decrease in effect when relative humidity is between 40% and 60%.

Napp and the Nosy team are conducting a study with a Rhode Island high school, correlating humidity levels with student absenteeism.

"Being in New England, it's an older school building built in the late 1800s," Napp explains. "In winter, humidity drops below 16%—breathtakingly dry. We're looking at whether drops in humidity correlate with increases in absenteeism."

Napp’s anticipated solution is to stay scrappy and affordable for the small building owner. "You could remediate a classroom for about $50 with a humidifier from Target," Napp notes. "If that measurably reduces absenteeism, that's a bargain compared to the cost of sick days."

Beyond Basic: Optimizing for Human Performance

For organizations that have mastered the fundamentals, the next frontier is using buildings to actively enhance human performance.

Elevated's experiments reveal fascinating connections between environmental factors and human behavior. "Decibel levels tend to rise the more CO2 in the air," McDannald observed through her studies. "People get shorter-tempered when CO2 levels rise. There's heightened awareness in your amygdala, which modifies and influences trust in your brain."

McDannald and the Elevated team will be publishing the results of their experiments within multiple whitepapers this year. They’ve gathered some rather surprising results:

• Circadian lighting, which gradually shifts color temperature throughout the day to match natural lighting, is supposed to boost alertness and mood. However, Elevated found that it triggered migraines in employees with neurological sensitivities. "It moves so slowly, but you can't see it, so it tends to set off migraines," McDannald explains. "We set lighting levels for morning blue light exposure but don't tune throughout the day anymore."
• McDannald experimented with pumping oxygen into the office, inspired by casino tactics, yet it proved ineffective. "It didn't take the CO2 out of the room," she laughs. "You can pump oxygen in, but it doesn't remove CO2. The only way to get CO2 out is to blow it out, so the oxygen intake needs to be built into the HVAC circulation to be effective."
• Elevated is studying the effect of electromagnetic fields (EMF) on productivity and wellness. Certain spaces within their office have EMF blockers. They are zoning spaces to not have WiFi seven in the rooms, with the hypothesis that overexposure can be damaging to health.

Few have taken the biohacking your building concept as far as the Elevated team. I asked McDannald what her recommendations were to a CEO or building owner who is just dipping their toe in what’s possible for their workforce:

“We have a product called Elevated Space and Air, and it's like a slimmed-down starter project for you. It starts with simple measurement of indoor air quality and people counting, which can really help you understand the density of your space. Then, it gives you an indication of how many people you should put in the space and how close you should space them. And that's really important to the start of Biohacking.”

The Business Case: Show Me the Money

Log in to continue reading. We cover how building owners are justifying the cost of improving their indoor environment, despite how skeptics are questioning the indirect ROI often associated with it, and we’ll give you a practical roadmap to starting your biohacking journey.

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For skeptics questioning the ROI of biohacking buildings, the evidence is mounting.

Elevated reports $300,000 in annual savings, $150,000 from reduced insurance premiums and another $150,000 from fewer sick days. "We haven't had person-to-person viral spread in two years," McDannald states, crediting their air quality monitoring and mitigation strategies.

But the softer benefits might be even more valuable. 

"As a CEO, you try to find every competitive advantage you can for your organization," McDannald explains. "If your people are thinking from their limbic system—fight or flight—they're not having deep analytical thinking in their prefrontal cortex. When you're having analytical thought about the work you're doing, the outcome improves."

Baird draws a parallel to a universally accepted workplace perk: "There are studies proving people are more productive with free caffeine in the office. Companies provide free coffee because they know there's a correlation. Can you 100% prove the coffee drives productivity? No, but the correlation is strong enough that every office has a coffee machine."

The same logic applies to indoor air quality—except the science is actually stronger.

Thus far, we’ve only covered the outcome of improved occupant experience, yet improving your indoor environment almost always decreases energy consumption as well. “Many customers are paying for it using savings in energy efficiency, and then one of the direct positives is that the people in the building feel better and perform better,” said Baird. The reality is that building owners are stacking outcomes to justify the investment in the technology. 

However, despite these clear benefits and a strong business case, formal requirements for air quality improvements remain limited. At least in the US, it appears that demand for air quality technology will continue to be optional. While regulations have been slow to materialize, McDannald’s hot take is that insurance companies will drive adoption. "I think the insurance companies will eventually push it through the cost of premiums. More research comes out daily about how air quality damages health, it won't be optional anymore."

Getting Started: A Practical Roadmap

For building owners ready to begin their biohacking journey, experts recommend starting simple:

Step 1: Measure What Matters 

"You can't make intelligent decisions without data," Napp emphasizes. Start with basic monitoring: temperature, humidity, CO2, and VOCs. Elevated's Space & Air, Nosy's upcoming platform, and Airthings' suite of IAQ tools offer entry-level solutions for buildings that have been ignoring their indoor air quality.

Step 2: Address the Low-Hanging Fruit 

Often, simple fixes yield dramatic results. Discover where you’re building is struggling the most and determine what simple solutions can improve it. Start with things like updating thermostats and identifying your worst-performing HVAC systems.

Step 3: Think Holistically

Occupancy, indoor air quality, temperature, humidity, lighting, etc., are all just one piece of the puzzle. As your data quality and quantity improve, ensure you’re looking at the big picture, and consult the experts to interpret the results.

Step 4: Make It Actionable

"Building managers don't need more charts," Napp notes. "They need a task list.'" The success of your biohacking journey will be directly dependent on the actions you are able to take from the data you gathered.