Low-Cost Sensor Terminals for Outdoor Thermal Comfort Modelling of Urban Settlement Areas

In this paper, the authors propose to design, develop, and implement a low-cost sensor terminal used in collecting data for assessing outdoor thermal comfort in urban settlement areas. The proposed design aims to increase the spatial resolution of meteorological data by deploying multiple sensor terminals in the city. To achieve this, the proposed system uses multiple low-cost, commercial-of-the-shelf sensors to measure meteorological parameters, such as surface temperature, air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed which are then transmitted wirelessly to a central hub. The data collected are input to an urban microclimate model to compute the Physiological Equivalent Temperature thermal index and assess the outdoor thermal comfort in an area. Preliminary results show that the sensor used can measure accurate readings while the system can operate continuously by collecting data at hourly intervals, thus providing data for outdoor thermal comfort assessment.