Researchers at the University of Sydney's Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Lab have engineered a system that tracks indoor climate factors in order to improve wellbeing.
According to indoor air quality expert, and Director of the IEQ Lab, Professor Richard de Dear, people today spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, so monitoring indoor climate is important.
“Many of us now spend our working lives almost exclusively inside office buildings. We therefore need to be better managing indoor environmental factors for the sake of human health and wellbeing long term," Professor de Dear explained.
Indoor Environmental Quality factors like air temperature, radiant heat, air movement, humidity, light, sound, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, along with various pollutants emitted from building materials, can have a considerable impact on productivity in the work place, as well as building sustainability.
Until now, no one has been able to capture all the IEQ data with just one piece of technology. To address this, University of Sydney PhD student Tom Parkinson, and his brother and research assistant Alex Parkinson developed the prototype for SAMBA (Sentient Ambient Monitoring of Buildings in Australia).
Packed with sensors, the compact, low-cost SAMBA devices are able to track all the vital IEQ factors. They are designed to be placed on work stations a couple of metres apart across an office floor.
Hundreds of SAMBA units are now in production and will be set up in around 50 offices across Australian capital cities over the next three months. Several organisations from Australia’s property, banking and building industries will take part in this first rollout of SAMBA.
Data captured by SAMBA is wirelessly relayed in real-time to the University of Sydney’s IEQ lab. The data is immediately analysed and interpreted by the lab’s analytics software against IEQ performance standards set by Green Star and NABERS rating systems.
Investa Property Group will be one of the early adopters of the SAMBA system. According to the organisation's General Manager of Environment and Safety, Shaun Condon, the technology will be an effective and user-friendly method of collecting accurate IEQ metrics and data, without requiring major modifications to building systems.
"It will give us the evidence to pinpoint what IEQ data is important and how to best capture, analyse and effectively report this information back to our tenants to improve their workplace environments," he said.
The huge volume of data collected by SAMBA will give building owners, operators and tenants timely and intelligible reports on their building’s IEQ performance.
Don't forget to register for the Australian Engineering Conference 2016 in Brisbane on November 23-25.