Collaboration and cross-faculty contributions have been the driver behind some of Northumbria's most groundbreaking and interdisciplinary initiatives over the years, with the University home to one of the biggest multidisciplinary hubs for human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design in the UK.
One example of this joined-up approach in action is a project which aims to improve the way buildings are designed in future, using smart sensors:
Smart Connected Buildings
Mould, mildew and damp cause
misery for thousands of people in homes across the UK, and cost housing
associations, landlords and homeowners millions of pounds a year in repairs. But now researchers at
Northumbria University, in Newcastle upon Tyne, have come up with a solution
which could lead to a change in how homes are designed in the future – making
mould a thing of the past.
Over the last year,
Northumbria academics, along with partners from BIM Academy and the National
Energy Foundation, have been working with local housing association Your Homes
Newcastle to find out more about how its tenants use their homes.
With permission from tenants,
sensors were placed in seven apartments, monitoring factors such as electricity
usage, room temperature, humidity, light and how householders move around the
rooms within the building. This can be used to
understand how tenants use buildings, provide alerts and advice which will help
them live more comfortably, and influence the design of buildings to better
reflect tenants’ requirements.
The Smart Connected Buildings project has been led by Dr Kay
Rogage, Research Fellow in Digital Living at Northumbria and an
active member of the University’s BIM Academy Research Team.
She explains: “One of the
benefits of this system is that it can be customised, so for example an alert
could be set up so that when the humidity in an individual flat or room goes
above a certain level the building owner or tenant would be notified. The data would also be
displayed on an online dashboard, showing humidity levels over a few days or
weeks, so patterns and potential issues could be identified.
"For the landlord this would
mean the conditions which lead to mould and mildew could be identified early
on, before they develop, minimising
the costs incurred by treating the problem, significantly reducing the number
of complaints and providing more comfortable living conditions for tenants.”
The project has been funded by Innovate UK, with
the aim of integrating building design information, sensor data and feedback
from building users to produce meaningful alerts and advice to builders and
owners.
The team involved now hope
to source additional funding to develop the prototype into a commercial grade
software which could be used by housing associations, property owners,
developers and others working within the housing and building sector. The prototype would include
additional features, such as the ability to extract data from Standard
Assessment Procedure (SAP) reports - used by the Government to assess and
compare the energy and environmental performance of homes. The reports contain useful
information such as the estimated energy consumption of a building and these
values could be included into the current alert system to automatically trigger
an alert if the estimates are exceeded.
A version of this
article originally appeared in the Northumbria University supplement produced with Times Higher Education.
