The toxic blooms hiding in many of our homes – and a new way to find them
'Indoor mould is exactly that; you can see the mould patterns on a wall, but you can't visualise the individual spores that are causing harm.'
Mould testers currently use sticky strips to trap spores and count them manually under the microscope. They also grow captured spores on agar plates to identify which species are present.
Those methods, however, are time-intensive, can miss hidden moulds and have error rates between 30 and 200 per cent, partly because they only capture small windows of time while spore concentrations can vary by a 10,000-fold difference over a single day.
The BioScout device automates spore-sampling in the air around crops by taking a snapshot through a microscope and harnessing AI to analyse whether mildew, rust, or diseases such as grape-rotting botrytis are present.
'It could maybe take an expert 20 minutes to analyse one image,' said Dr Michelle Demers, head of science at BioScout.
'We can essentially train AI to replicate the behaviour of an expert, except that it can do 100,000 images in a quarter of a second.
'The beauty of it is we can not only tell you what you have, but we can tell you how much of it you have.'
The effort to repurpose the device into an indoor monitoring tool is backed by a grant from the NSW Chief Scientist's office through the NSW Smart Sensing Network's Grand Challenge Fund.
'It could really help with our understanding of exposure limits. It's a very complex area to monitor and evaluate,' said Western Sydney University occupational hygienist Dr Margaret Davidson, another researcher on the project.
'The concealed mould is particularly nasty and hard to identify because if you can't see it, and people are getting sick, they might be blaming other things.'
Former Sydney renter Emmeline, a nurse who did not want her last name used, said she was sick with flu-like symptoms for a year from hidden mould at a Meadowbank apartment. She moved into a West Ryde flat with her now-husband who then also became sick for months with vertigo and cyclical vomiting.
Doctors said it was probably linked to mould growing up through their floorboards. As soon as they moved out, symptoms lifted.
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The World Health Organisation estimates 10 to 50 per cent of Australian homes have mould. Dr Heike Neumeister-Kemp, an international expert in the field, said mould was almost always hidden, usually within wet walls or damp crawl spaces.
She warned in a 2023 paper that mould poses a danger to those returning to homes after floods. The victims recovering from the northern NSW flood disasters are on her mind.
People often particularly fear black mould, but fragments and spores of any mould can trigger health issues, and some secrete toxins as well, Neumeister-Kemp said.
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