People spend 80% to 90% of their time indoors – and poor indoor air quality can kill. One of the most significant environmental health risks globally, poor indoor air quality is estimated to be responsible for 3.2 million deaths annually worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where families lack access to clean energy and use wood, kerosene, or coal fires for cooking and heating.
In high-income countries, indoor air quality deaths are less about wood smoke, and more about nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves, mold, and the release of volatile organic compounds and other gases from manufactured products into the air – especially new furniture, flooring, paint, and plastics.
Such pollution triggers or worsens ischemic heart disease and stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infection in children, lung cancer, and even dementia.
There is a growing need to improve nature-based solutions to effectively maintain indoor air quality without worsening pollution due to the rising demand for building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. Yet doing so in modern buildings is increasingly difficult to maintain at lower energy costs.
Now, researchers at the soil and water sciences department in the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggest that vertical green walls offer a natural solution – but their performance is inconsistent, and maintenance is so complex that they have limited use.
But now, VertINGreen, a new technology they have developed, solves this by using artificial intelligence, plant data, and remote sensing to both predict how green walls will perform before installation and monitor their health in real time.
Their new study has just been published in the journal Indoor Air under the title “VertINGreen: A practical application for planning and monitoring indoor vertical green living walls based on remote sensing and machine learning models.”
Yehuda Yungstein and Dr. David Helman developed this innovative web-based platform that transforms vertical green walls from decorative features into intelligent, responsive environmental systems. This, they say, makes them a reliable, efficient, and scalable tool for improving air quality and reducing energy consumption. The system can replace air being filtered, circulated, and cooled at a high energy cost in modern office towers and public buildings.
Imagine those same spaces quietly breathing on their own, supported by living walls of plants that not only beautify interiors, but also actively clean the air and reduce energy use. Green walls are known to produce a positive impact on indoor air purification, functioning as biological filters, reducing various pollutants, including volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter.
“They have enormous potential,” the researchers noted, “but until now, we lacked the tools to truly understand and manage how they function indoors.”
Helman, who focuses his research on digital agriculture and remote sensing, explained that VertINGreen changes that by bringing together remote sensing technology and machine learning, turning plant-covered walls into data-rich systems that can be planned with precision and monitored in real time.
A planning tool that replaces guesswork with confidence
VERTINGREEN BEGAN with nearly 2,000 meticulous measurements of how common indoor plants “breathe,” how they absorb carbon dioxide, and how they release water under different conditions. From this, the team built powerful predictive models capable of forecasting how a green wall will perform before it is even installed.
The system estimates how much carbon dioxide the plants will absorb; how they will respond to indoor climate conditions; and even how they might help reduce energy use by lowering the need for mechanical ventilation.
The result is a planning tool that replaces guesswork with confidence. The system can identify early signs of stress; map plant activity across entire walls; and detect problems weeks before they are visible to the human eye. Safe fertilizer is added to the water, which is recycled hydroponically.
The plants used are all indoor perennials – baby rubber plants, Moses-in-the-cradle plants, spider plants, peace lilies, lipstick plants, and heartleaf philodendrons. While most of the walls are green, some have lovely flowers; when they dry up, they fall to the floor and can be swept up.
The green view has a direct impact on human physiology and psychology by reducing stress and negative psychological symptoms, increasing the abundance and diversity of beneficial bacteria on human skin, and enhancing the productivity of office workers.
The irrigating computer, placed in a nearby room, costs about $3,000, and plastic pipes that can be hooked up to additional stories in the building are cheap. PVC shields separate the green wall from the actual wall of the room where it’s installed, he added.
VertINGreen provides two kinds of tools – a planning tool that enables users to simulate different scenarios for an indoor vertical, green living system to achieve maximum carbon reduction and energy saving, as well as minimum water use by the plants, and a monitoring tool for detecting anomalies across the living wall to help users manage the wall before any substantial damage occurs, the researchers said.
“VertINGreen represents more than a technological innovation; it signals a shift in how buildings are conceived. Instead of relying solely on energy-intensive systems, indoor environments can increasingly integrate living, adaptive components that work in harmony with technology.
For Yungstein and Helman, the goal is clear – to bridge the gap between scientific understanding and real-world application.
“VertINGreen allows us to move from inspiration to implementation,” they asserted. “It gives architects, engineers, and building managers the tools they need to trust and fully utilize nature inside buildings.”
As cities continue to grow upward and inward, innovations like VertINGreen suggest a future where walls do more than divide space – they help sustain it,” Helman explained.
“We are researchers; we don’t sell the system,” he added. “We developed a Web app at vertingreen.streamlit.app to give architects, engineers, and building managers the tools they need to trust and fully utilize nature inside buildings. We encourage both the scientific and general-public communities to test and use our VertINGreen for planning, testing, and monitoring indoor green living walls,” he concluded.
The Environment and Climate Change portal is produced in cooperation with the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Jerusalem Post maintains all editorial decisions related to the content.
