Personalised and Sustainable IEQ Monitoring: Use of Multi-Modal and Pervasive Technologies.

BACKGROUND: Monitoring indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is important to better understand occupant health. Passive IEQ monitoring with digital technologies may provide insightful quantitative data to better inform, e.g., health interventions. Yet, many traditional approaches with known IEQ technologies have limited utility due to high costs or coarse granularity-focusing on the collective rather than individuals. Equally, subjective approaches (e.g., manual surveys) have poor adherence (i.e., are burdensome). There is a need for holistic IEQ measurement techniques that are sustainable (affordable, i.e., low-cost) and personalised. Here, the aim of this case report is to explore the use of low-cost digital approaches to gather personalised quantitative and qualitative data. METHODS: This study deploys a personalised monitoring approach with IEQ devices coupled to wearables, weather data, and qualitative data, captured through a post-study interview. RESULTS: The mixed-method, single-case approach gathered data continuously for six months with a reduced burden, by using digital technologies to affirm environmental factors, which were subjectively evaluated by the participant. Quantitative data reinforced qualitative data, removing the need for generalising qualitative findings against a collective. CONCLUSIONS: This study showed that the single-case, mixed-method approach used here can provide a holistic approach not previously obtainable with traditional pen-and-paper techniques alone. The use of a low-cost multi-modal device linked with common home and wearable technology suggest a contemporary and sustainable IEQ measurement approach that could inform future work to better determine occupant health.

A protocol for longitudinal monitoring of individual building occupants and their environments.

Buildings account for approximately 40% of the energy consumption across the European Union, so there is a requirement to strive for better energy performance to reduce the global impact of urbanised societies. However, energy performant buildings can negatively impact building occupants (e.g., comfort, health and/or wellbeing) due to a trade-off between airtightness and air circulation. Thus, there is a need to monitor Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) to inform how it impacts occupants and hence redefine value within building performance metrics. An individualised study design would enable researchers to gain new insights into the effects of environmental changes on individuals for more targeted e.g., health interventions or nuanced and improved building design(s). This paper presents a protocol to conduct longitudinal monitoring of an individual and their immediate environment. Additionally, a novel approach to environmental perception gathering is proposed that will monitor environmental factors at an individual level to investigate subjective survey data pertaining to the participant's perceptions of IEQ (e.g., perceived air quality, thermal conditions, light, and noise). This protocol has the potential to expose time-differential phenomena between environmental changes and an individual's behavioural and physiological responses. This could be used to support building performance monitoring by providing an interventional assessment of building performance renovations. In the future it could also provide building scientists with a scalable approach for environmental monitoring that focuses specifically on individual health and wellbeing.

Communication and building social capital in community supported agriculture.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes (programs) provide an alternative means for obtaining produce, through direct purchase from farms. They are also often driven by a vision of transforming the current mainstream food system and seek to build a community of people who support this vision. Social capital refers to the networks and ties between people and groups and the impact of these ties on access to influence, information, opportunity, and ability to organize. Social capital is built by CSAs and helps foster and stabilize the grassroots agricultural innovations that are needed for the development of sustainable food systems. Using the concept of social capital, we studied communication methods of four CSAs in the UK, examining the interactions between CSAs and their members and within each of their membership groups. We carried out in-depth interviews with 49 CSA members to establish what interactions they had with their CSA and with other members, and analyzed our data thematically to identify the characteristics of interactions that were important to participants. We consider how our research may benefit CSA organizations by enabling them to learn what their members want and to learn about the varied ways in which members conceptualize their experiences of community derived from their membership. We found that the various CSA communication strategies, which consist of frequent and varying virtual and face-to-face interactions, are able to promote development of both bridging and bonding social capital. Overall, there is a desire for social connection in CSA memberships. Furthermore, in CSAs where members can interact easily, there is potential for CSA membership to provide members with communication that is important as a source of both knowledge and social connection. CSAs can maximize both social capital and member satisfaction by using a range of communication media and methods to meet their members' circumstances and preferences.

A Scoping Review of Technological Approaches to Environmental Monitoring.

Indoor environment quality (IEQ) can negatively affect occupant health and wellbeing. Air quality, as well as thermal, visual and auditory conditions, can determine how comfortable occupants feel within buildings. Some can be measured objectively, but many are assessed by interpreting qualitative responses. Continuous monitoring by passive sensors may be useful to identify links between environmental and physiological changes. Few studies localise measurements to an occupant level perhaps due to many environmental monitoring solutions being large and expensive. Traditional models for occupant comfort analysis often exacerbate this by not differentiating between individual building occupants. This scoping review aims to understand IEQ and explore approaches as to how it is measured with various sensing technologies, identifying trends for monitoring occupant health and wellbeing. Twenty-seven studies were reviewed, and more than 60 state-of-the-art and low-cost IEQ sensors identified. Studies were found to focus on the home or workplace, but not both. This review also found how wearable technology could be used to augment IEQ measurements, creating personalised approaches to health and wellbeing. Opportunities exist to make individuals the primary unit of analysis. Future research should explore holistic personalised approaches to health monitoring in buildings that analyse the individual as they move between environments.

T-Align, a web-based tool for comparison of multiple terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism profiles.

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (tRFLP) is a potentially high-throughput method for the analysis of complex microbial communities. Comparison of multiple tRFLP profiles to identify shared and unique components of microbial communities however, is done manually, which is both time consuming and error prone. This paper describes a freely accessible web-based program, T-Align (http://inismor.ucd.ie/~talign/), which addresses this problem. Initially replicate profiles are compared and used to generate a single consensus profile containing only terminal restriction fragments that occur in all replicate profiles. Subsequently consensus profiles representing different communities are compared to produce a list showing whether a terminal restriction fragment (TRF) is present in a particular sample and its relative fluorescence intensity. The use of T-Align thus allows rapid comparison of numerous tRFLP profiles. T-Align is demonstrated by alignment of tRFLP profiles generated from bacterioplankton communities collected from the Irish and Celtic Seas in November 2000. Ubiquitous TRFs and site-specific TRFs were identified using T-Align.