Luminaire-based environmental sensing for comfort monitoring and control

Various building applications use environmental sensing information in the form of temperature and relative humidity for controlling and monitoring to deliver comfortable environments to users. We present a multi-modal sensor system for delivering temperature and relative humidity data, where each multi-modal sensor is integrated into a luminaire of a lighting system. Fusion methods are presented to process raw sensor measurements to address two challenges in estimating temperature and relative humidity reliably around the user workspace: the sensors are located at the ceiling, and the sensor measurements are impacted by thermal variations due to luminaire dimming controls. The proposed sensing methods are evaluated in an experimental office setup and were shown to meet required levels of application performance.