The Sense of Sensors

Sensors are nowadays more and more common in buildings because they are becoming everyday cheaper, reliable and long lasting. Applications inside, outside and in between the built layers are more and more common and therefor the possibility to collect a big amount of data. However, the question is: does it make any Sense? Huge amount of data does not mean that the building is nicer and works better. Sometime the excess of technology and the presence of these devices ends up in a lack of responsibility by the user and, in some cases, the building does not work better than one without all these invisible measurements. Thinking and adapting the purpose of the sensors and educate users, on contrary, allow us to have a more interactive building and the possibility to check it very quickly with an app and run it from remote. Thus it is very important to set up what kind of sensors we need and how we collect the data and how we interpret them in a correct and fast way, being data so many and being the user not necessarily an Engineer. Some experiences will be shown seeing the effect of users and also actual benchmark technologies that allow us to live in an Active House and check it live, thanks to an app that shows several sensors outputs. The paper will also show an experimental case study at Politecnico di Milano, VELUXlab, where sensors have been installed for different purposes, since some years, and where the building behaviour has been checked with and with-out occupants. Big Data are around us, but sometimes it seems that we forget the basics and the world surrounding us when too much technology seems to substitute our senses. Finally, the goal is to show that technology and remote sensing is efficient and produces a better living environment only if it does not cancel our singular responsibility and our capability to trust in our senses and in a clever use of our architectures.