Living Lab

Real-world monitoring of indoor environments and occupant wellbeing

Buildings designed for energy efficiency often fail to support the health and wellbeing of the people inside them. As we spend over 90% of our time indoors, understanding how indoor environmental quality (IEQ) affects our health, comfort, and productivity is critical—yet most building science research happens in controlled laboratory settings that don’t capture the complexity of real-world conditions.

The SAPL Living Laboratory addresses this gap by transforming our new downtown campus into an instrumented research environment. Located in a repurposed office tower— part of Calgary’s unique downtown transformation— the Living Lab provides an ideal setting to study how dense, urban, glass-façade buildings can be designed and operated to support both occupant wellbeing and sustainability goals.

We are currently recruiting MDR students for this project. Learn more and apply here.

The new SAPL downtown campus in a repurposed office tower. The views from the windows mostly include urban environment. The proposed plan for type of collected data and devices incluidng environmental sensors and wearable devices for monitoring IEQ and occupant health.

This project establishes the foundational infrastructure for the SAPL Living Lab by deploying a network of environmental sensors and wearable devices to monitor how indoor conditions affect occupant health and comfort in real-time.

What We’re Measuring:

  • Environmental Monitoring: Light levels, spectral content, temperature, humidity, air quality, Radon, and acoustics across representative spaces
  • Occupant Experience: Comfort, mood, activity, social interactions through surveys and interviews
  • Health Indicators: Sleep patterns, activity levels, and circadian alignment using wearable sensors
  • Building Performance: Energy consumption and spatial usage patterns