Air quality has a huge impact on the comfort and healthiness of various environments. According to the World Health Organization, people who are exposed to chemical, biological and/or physical agents in buildings with low air quality and poor ventilation are more prone to be affected by psycho-physical discomfort, respiratory tract and central nervous system diseases. Moreover, in recent years, the time spent indoors has increased by around 90%. If we consider that respiratory diseases are mainly transmitted from human to human through close contact, airborne respiratory droplets and contaminated surfaces, and that there is a strict relationship between air pollution and the spread of the diseases, it becomes even more necessary to monitor and control these environmental conditions. This situation has inevitably led us to consider renovating buildings with the aim of improving both the well-being of the occupants (safety, ventilation, heating) and the energy efficiency, including monitoring the internal comfort using sensors and the IoT. These two objectives often require opposite approaches and strategies. This paper aims to investigate indoor monitoring systems to increase the quality of life of occupants, proposing an innovative approach consisting of the definition of new indices that consider both the concentration of the pollutants and the exposure time. Furthermore, the reliability of the proposed method was enforced using proper decision-making algorithms, which allows one to consider measurement uncertainty during decisions. Such an approach allows for greater control over the potentially harmful conditions and to find a good trade-off between well-being and the energy efficiency objectives.
The growing demand of energy and the need of finding alternative energy sources to the traditional ones, due to the progressive decrease of fossil fuels and an increasing concern towards the environment, have led to a revolution in terms of energy production in the last decade. As a consequence, the distributed generation is more and more widely spreading. The network, in this new dimension, has to change its management and the energy distribution so to achieve and maintain high efficiency requirements. Coming to drop the concept of centralized production, it is immediate to conclude that an efficient distribution of energy must necessarily bring into account the energy footprint of the area, because the energy transport should be always as short as possible, to minimize losses and maximize the efficiency of the network. This concept is the core of the smart-grid idea, on which the global scientific community is investing heavily in research, the idea is a power distribution grid, based on the experience in the information and communications technology field, which can route the energy through appropriate algorithms that are able to determine the optimal path. Of course, behind all this there must be a network structure capable of acquiring detailed data from widespread production and consumption of energy and make them easily available along with additional information, e.g. the Power Quality of the energy exchanged. This information is demanded by simple user, who wants to personally evaluate the functioning of the system, and also by technical personnel, who needs to access to reliable data to perform targeted and efficient interventions. In the present paper, the authors propose a smart energy meter for energy management in power grids. The measurement system has been projected and developed according to the IEEE 1451 (ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451) guidelines. The system is based on a mobile application in order to improve the data exchange and availability.
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