Challenges in developing a generic monitoring framework for pan European energy usage and environmental monitoring

Abstract

The ability to easily monitor different aspects of the environment is essential to achieve the aspirations of smart homes, smart buildings and smart cities across Europe. A wide range of sensors are available for both the domestic and commercial markets to enable different aspects of the environment to be monitored. These sensors are disparate, requiring different interfaces and utilizing conflicting data formats. This paper reports on the development of a generic monitoring framework to capture and analyse data from ubiquitous sensing devices in smart cities. The framework has been tested by capturing energy usage data from both public and commercial buildings, and domestic homes in three cities across two European countries. Dashboards were created to enable facility managers and home owners to compare energy usage with similar buildings in different cities. The paper discusses the technical and data quality challenges encountered with capturing data from domestic and non-domestic buildings and highlights the need for a generic context framework to support monitoring and analysis of the pan-European data captured. 1

Sensing Noise as an Information Object in Socio-Technical Environmental Monitoring

“…A multi-sensor architecture was therefore used (Fig. 2) to capture a range of data about the environment in which the noise was recorded to assist with identifying and validating the identification of the noise based on the generic monitoring framework of [12] [13]. Environmental noise levels are normally measured externally, however, as we are focusing on the impact of nocturnal noise on an actor's sleep patterns, we measured noise from internally located microphones.…”