The National Research Council Canada (NRC) announced a research project on wireless sensors for intelligent buildings aiming at developing and linking arrays of indoor environment sensors to help improve a building's environmental health, energy efficiency and maintenance, as well as the general comfort of its occupants. Dr. Newsham says building sensors can be used to detect a wide variety of environmental conditions such as carbon dioxide, temperature, light levels, noise levels and occupancy rates.

Such data could then be collated centrally where "some intelligence is applied" to decide whether it's necessary to change operational settings. "Signals would then be sent to actuators within the building systems to adjust an airflow rate, temperature or light level in ways that are better for office workers and management, and increase energy efficiency," he explains. According to the organization’s press release, under this three year project, led by the NRC Information and Communication Technologies (NRC-ICT) key sector, researchers from several NRC labs will integrate both existing and new sensing hardware, a wireless communication interface, and software-based analysis and feedback systems into a number of demonstration platforms.