Citizen-oriented technologies in the cities of tomorrow

Abstract

The paper reviews some of the latest researches and future trends in the field of technologies to support sustainable, comfortable and healthy citizens life in the cities of tomorrow. A specific focus is on advanced methods to guarantee comfort and energy efficiency in the built environment, together with the support to the ageing people in their homes. Innovative sensing systems are presented to monitor both the environment conditions and people in a non-intrusive way, thus allowing the implementation of efficient management strategies and new social services. The review presents real case studies properly equipped with comfort measurement systems, sensor networks including physiological parameters orwith specificHVACand construction components to assess the effects on energy consumptions and comfort levels of different control strategies and configurations. In addition, distributed generation technologies installed at final users together with their increasing awareness in energy consumption patterns, result in the “prosumer”: a citizen that simultaneously acts as an aware energy consumer and producer. Based on the achieved outcomes, a discussion about the most promising research lines for citizen-oriented technologies in the cities of tomorrow is finally presented.