Community based monitoring of indoor environments

Abstract

Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) problems such as poor thermal conditions and exposure to particulate matter pose health and well-being concerns for occupants. The increasing availability of low-cost sensors enable community-based monitoring (CBM) of IEQ, providing increased data coverage but with trade-offs for data quality. To better understand the usefulness and related data processing needs, we present an initial analysis of CBM data. The analysis includes 124 indoor sensors across central Europe from which 80 passed the exclusion criteria. The analysis revealed some lacks in meta data concerning the sensor placement, slight differences between urban and non-urban areas, and extensive need for data cleaning but also the significant potential to gain insights into historic and real-time IEQ exposures for large numbers of buildings.