Wearable Devices for Environmental Monitoring in the Built Environment: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which is rapidly increasing the number of network-connected and interconnected objects, could have a far-reaching impact in identifying the link between human health, well-being, and environmental concerns. In line with the IoT concept, many commercial wearables have been introduced in recent years, which differ from the usual devices in that they use the term “smart” alongside the terms “watches”, “glasses”, and “jewellery”. Commercially available wearables aim to enhance smartphone functionality by enabling payment for commercial items or monitoring physical activity. However, what is the trend of scientific production about the concept of wearables regarding environmental monitoring issues? What are the main areas of interest covered by scientific production? What are the main findings and limitations of the developed solution in this field? The methodology used to answer the above questions is based on a systematic review. The data were acquired following a reproducible methodology. The main result is that, among the thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality environmental factors, the last one is the most considered when using wearables even though in combination with some others. Another relevant finding is that of the acquired studies; in only one, the authors shared their wearables as an open-source device, and it will probably be necessary to encourage researchers to consider open-source as a means to promote scalability and proliferation of new wearables customized to cover different domains.

Relationship between exposure to ozone and exacerbation requiring hospital admission among patients with asthma: a case-control study in central Taiwan

“…23 39 Some Open access wearable devices have been proposed to measure the precise exposure of air pollution in individual patients; the accuracy of measurements of O 3 obtained by wearable devices appears to be lower compared with the standardised measurement of levels of air pollutants conducted by Taiwan's EPA. 40 There were limitations in this study. First, this was a single-centre study conducted in Taiwan, and our findings may therefore not be generalisable to other populations.…”

A Review of the Use of Wearables in Indoor Environmental Quality Studies and an Evaluation of Data Accessibility from a Wearable Device

“…Wearable devices can be used to collect localized IEQ measurements as well as subjective and objective HPIs that traditionally have been limited to laboratory settings or a small number of participants. Some examples include measuring illuminance at the eye, CO 2 in the inhalation zone (Coulby et al, 2020;Salamone et al, 2021), EMAs, and electrodermal activity (Jayathissa et al, 2020a;Zhang et al, 2020). However, to effectively utilize wearables in IEQ studies, there is a need to identify IEQ factors and HPIs that need to be collected (Altomonte et al, 2020), explore the role of wearables for collecting these data, and discuss considerations for data collection.…”

“…A large-scale study used sound measurements from a smart watch to examine personal sound exposures (Smith et al, 2020). Salamone et al (2021) provided a comprehensive review of previous studies that used wearables for IEQ sensing.…”

A New Wearable System for Sensing Outdoor Environmental Conditions for Monitoring Hyper-Microclimate

“…Future comfort investigations should focus on the interactions between domains, and for this purpose, monitoring systems should be able to measure various environmental parameters related to different comfort domains. Besides, according to Salamone et al [48], wearable sensing techniques dedicated to environmental monitoring should also consider ergonomic design principles and present user-friendly solutions.…”