Smart Healthy Schools: An IoT-enabled concept for multi-room dynamic air quality control
A. Zivelonghi, Alessandro Giuseppi
Abstract
Smart Healthy Schools (SHS) is a new paradigm in building engineering and infection risk control in school buildings where the disciplines of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ), IoT (Internet of Things) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) merge together. In the post-pandemic era, equipping schools with a network of smart IoT sensors has become critical to aspire for the optimal control of the IAQ and lowering the airborne infection risk of several pathogens. Thermal energy waste remains of major concern but it can be mitigated within a SHS monitoring architecture thanks to the flexibility of the LoRaWAN protocol able to process also energy and climatic data at room and building scale. In this work, we report the design of the AulaSicura platform, an IoT control system designed to implement the SHS paradigm in existing and new school buildings. The cloud-based LoRa system implemented by GiZeroTech is capable of continuous and simultaneous monitoring of a variety of IAQ parameters including indoor/oudoor temperatures, rel. humidities and human-emitted excess CO2. The multi-room monitoring concept of indoor-CO2 levels allows centralized control of natural ventilation levels in individual classrooms and can handle (quasi)-real-time data post-processing, relevant for future developments in (quasi)-real-rime infection risk assessment. It is also extensible to up to one thousand of classrooms per LoRa-node allowing centralized control of school districts at an urban scale. Moreover, through Modbus-LoRa I/O converters, AulaSicura can also control the same amount of mechanical ventilation units per node either in pure or hybrid mechanical ventilation modes.