Monitoring infrastructure for occupant well-being and comfort in a Living-Lab: a focus on wearable devices

Today, building design focuses on optimizing indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and ensuring the comfort and well-being of occupants. In this context, a continuous monitoring infrastructure can provide the necessary data to ensure that the environment adapts proactively and in real-time to the occupants’ needs. This approach, applied in a research context, requires the simultaneous monitoring of three levels of measurement: objective-environmental parameters, using lab-grade instruments in the environment and wearable devices; subjective-psychological parameters, obtained through questionnaires and cognitive tasks; and physiological parameters, gathered via wearable devices. This paper presents a 3-layer monitoring infrastructure and its first demonstration use case, conducted in Politecnico di Torino for two weeks in March 2025. The aim is to investigate whether wearable sensors can provide objective insights into a deeper understanding of the relationship between IEQ and occupants’ comfort and well-being. Some preliminary findings are discussed, along with a review of the state of the art in wearable technologies across the four environmental domains, and the rationale behind the selection of specific devices.