As Chiang Mai continues to grapple with persistent air pollution and dangerous PM2.5 pollution, Suan Dok Hospital has rolled out more than 500 homemade air purifiers across its facilities in an effort to improve indoor air quality.
The hospital has developed a simple but effective DIY device known as the “PM2.5 dust-filter basket”, a low-cost purifier designed for practical everyday use in multiple areas throughout the hospital.
Asst. Prof. Dr. Sa-ngob Sanit, Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Chiang Mai University, said the hospital had been actively looking for ways to make indoor air safer amid worsening seasonal smog in northern Thailand.
He explained that the hospital’s engineering team began developing the DIY air purifier back in 2020, creating a practical solution suited to a large medical campus with numerous departments and high foot traffic.
Because Suan Dok is one of the region’s largest hospitals, producing the units in-house has allowed the hospital to cut costs significantly while distributing between 500 and 600 DIY air purifiers across various departments and service areas.
The initiative is intended to improve air quality throughout the hospital for both staff and visitors. The purifiers currently support around 7,000 hospital personnel, while the hospital also sees more than 10,000 visitors and patients per day.
According to Dr. Sa-ngob, each unit costs around 1,200–1,500 baht to produce, depending on the quality of materials used, such as the grade of fan and filter. While the price varies according to component quality and filtration efficiency, he said the units perform on par with many commercially available air purifiers, with the added advantage of being far more affordable.
That lower cost, he said, has made it possible for the hospital to produce and deploy the devices on a much larger scale.
