A Cost-Effective, Scalable, and Portable IoT Data Infrastructure for Indoor Environment Sensing

The vast number of facility management systems, home automation systems, and the ever-increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are in constant need of environmental monitoring. Indoor environment data can be utilized to improve indoor facilities and better occupants' working and living experience, however, such data are scarce because many existing facility monitoring technologies are expensive and proprietary for certain building systems, such as building automation systems, energy management systems, and maintenance systems. In this work, the authors designed and prototyped a cost-effective, distributed, scalable, and portable indoor environmental data collection system, Building Data Lite (BDL). BDL is based on Raspberry Pi computers and multiple changeable arrays of sensors, such as sensors of temperature, humidity, light, motion, sound, vibration, and multiple types of gases. The system includes a distributed sensing network and a centralized server. The server provides a web-based graphical user interface that enables users to access the collected data over the Internet. To evaluate the BDL system's functionality, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and portability, the research team conducted a case study in an affordable housing community where the system prototype is deployed to 12 households. The case study results indicate that the system is functioning as designed, costs about \$3500 to sense 48 building zones (about \$73 per zone) and provides 12 types of indoor environment data, is easy to scale up, and is fully portable.