A multi-sensor wireless solution for indoor thermal comfort monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost, distributed monitoring system for thermal comfort management in indoor environments. Thermal comfort depends on the combination of various physical quantities, such as temperature, humidity, density of people and air flow speed. Usually, most of commercial solutions measure only temperature and humidity in a single location of the room. However, better results can be achieved if distributed measurements are performed using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The WSN described in this paper consists of nodes that are equipped not only with basic temperature and humidity sensors, but also with two further types of transducers measuring the air flow speed and the radiant temperature, respectively, thus greatly improving thermal comfort estimation accuracy. In the following, the WSN architecture and the performance of the sensors used on each WSN node are analyzed in detail. In addition, some experimental results collected indoors using a small WSN prototype are reported.