Special Session 3

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) impacts human well-being, health and productivity. This is more relevant considering that humans spend roughly 90% of their time indoors. Therefore, several problems could arise from the lack of comfortable environments, such as sick building syndrome, complaints, absenteeism, and reduced work productivity. Furthermore, inadequate control of buildings’ operation, not based on the real comfort needs, can lead to poor use of energy for heating, cooling, ventilation and illumination. Comfort perception is the sum of several factors: environmental, physiological and psychological. Therefore, the mere measurement of environmental factors leads far from the capability of measuring the real human perception. To overcome this barrier, multi-domain approaches are being developed to create personalized comfort models used for real-time comfort measurement and control, for buildings’ performance assessment and for buildings’ design.
This special session is dedicated to research outcomes in the field of new multi-domain comfort sensing technologies, data analysis techniques, measurements protocols and experimental investigations performed in real and in controlled environments. Contributions are welcome to open discussions on the application of wearable sensors, machine learning and wireless sensor networks to investigate human perception in indoor environments.

The session is promoted by the NEXT.COM project – funded by MUR through the PRIN 2017 call – which develops a frontier breakthrough of comfort investigation in the built environment by testing and validating a brand new multiphysics, multidomain and multisensorial comfort experimental protocol and exhaustive analytic interpretation model.

Prof. Marco Arnesano,PhD in Mechanical and Thermal Measurements from Università Politecnica delle Marche, is an Associate Professor at eCampus University and Coordinator of Industrial Engineering courses (bachelor and master degrees). His research is focused on the development of innovative measurement systems for the built environment: energy and indoor environmental monitoring and control through the application of embedded and IoT sensors, physiological measurements, signal processing and data analysis. Research activities are conducted within European (FP7, H2020) and National projects. He is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications for international journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Anna Laura Pisello, PhD in Energy Engineering from University of Perugia in 2013, is currently Associate Professor of Applied Physics at University of Perugia, Italy and visiting research associate at Princeton University (NJ, USA). She is author of more than 150 papers among which more than 90 in international refereed journals. She won seven international academic awards in 2013-2018 and several european projects under the framework of Horizon 2020 program. Her research interests cover two main directions: innovative smart materials for building envelope multifunctional optimization and thermo-physics characterization, and indoor-outdoor microclimate for environmental comfort and energy saving, with dedicated attention to dense urban areas and city resilience to climate change. Under the framework, she investigates energy efficiency and thermal-energy performance optimization in buildings; continuous monitoring techniques for detecting building thermal-energy performance; high albedo solutions for passive cooling and as mitigation strategy against urban heat island phenomenon; local climate boundary conditions affecting building thermal-energy behavior; indoor-outdoor microclimate analysis for preserving cultural heritage.

Enrico Fabrizio, PhD in Energy from Politecnico di Torino (POLITO) and INSA de Lyon, is associate professor of Building Physics at the Energy Department of POLITO and associate editor at “Sustainable Cities and Society” journal.
His research on optimization of zero-energy buildings and energy systems is conducted through numerical developments and experimental monitoring to promote an energy-conscious design of buildings.
He was awarded in 2014 the REHVA Young Scientist Award by the European Federation of Air Conditioning Associations. He participated in the organizing committee of the IBPC 2014, Building Simulation 2019 and RoomVent 2020 conferences. He is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed publications indexed internationally and of two educational volumes on building physics.

Annamaria Buonomano, PhD in Energetics from University of Palermo, is an Associate Professor of Applied Thermodynamics at the Department of Industrial Engineering of University of Naples Federico II. She is actively involved in research topics regarding building energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, also developed in collaborative research activities with international research groups on the design of net zero energy buildings and communities through the integration of passive solar thermal systems in buildings and the use of electric vehicles to add flexibility to buildings. She is author of more than 100 refereed papers, published on International Journals and conference proceedings. She serves as Associate Editor of the Elsevier Journal ‘Energy Reports’ and is a member of the editorial boards of several Elsevier Journals.