Flexible Indoor Environmental Quality Monitoring for Interoperable Subsystems in Buildings

In urbanized areas most humans spend 90% of their time indoors, which makes the quality of indoor environments a major concern. While there have been many separate sensors which report specific parameters such as temperature, humidity, illuminance, CO₂ etc., a flexible platform onto which ad-hoc ensembles of sensors can be deployed is missing. The flexibility in sensor selection for the ensemble translates to flexibility in cost incurred. Also, interoperability with other subsystems, such as air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation systems, in the building becomes a requirement for achieving useful system-level integration. A novel platform containing new hardware and software is proposed in this work to satisfy the environmental quality requirements, with a flexible architecture for interoperability. The platform achieves plug-and-play of sensors along with minimal energy expenditure to maintain the indoor environmental quality.