Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Accurate Ambient Temperature Monitoring

In structures with reduced monitoring budgets, the high cost of commercial metering devices is always an obstacle for monitoring structural health. This might be an issue when temperatures must be measured for both structural and environmental reasons. To fill this gap, in this paper, a novel monitoring system is proposed for the accurate measurement of indoor temperature in buildings. This protocol is characterized by its generality, as it can be easily adapted to measure any structural or environmental parameters on site. The proposed monitoring system uses from one to eight low-cost sensors to obtain multiple measurements of the ambient temperatures. The accuracy ranges of the developed monitoring systems with different numbers of sensors are statistically analysed. The results indicate that the discrepancy of the measurements decreases with the increase in the number of sensors, as the maximum standard deviation of 10 sensors (0.42) decreases to 0.32 and 0.27 for clusters of 20 and 30 sensors, respectively.

Automated summary

A novel monitoring system is proposed for accurate measurement of indoor temperature in buildings. By using multiple low-cost sensors, multiple measurements of ambient temperatures can be obtained, and statistical analysis shows that increasing the number of sensors reduces the discrepancy in measurements.