A new wearable monitoring system for investigating pedestrians' environmental conditions: Development of the experimental tool and start-up findings

Highlights: • Outdoor microclimate continuous monitoring in urban areas is carried out in summer. • Wearable monitoring is used to study pedestrians' exposure to urban environment. • Microclimate, air quality, IR/VIS images field study is performed. • Various intra-urban environmental configurations are shown by continuous monitoring. • Novel wearable system identifies citizens' resilience and promising mitigation. Urban population is predicted to increase rapidly and massively in the next decades, by producing also the exacerbation of urban scale climate change imputable to anthropogenic actions, such as urban heat island. In this view, urban pedestrians assume a key role in determining city livability in dense built environments, typically much more polluted than suburban or rural areas. Despite that, urban heat island experimental studies are pretty focused on data collected by means of permanent microclimate stations for environmental monitoring, also coupled with satellite measurements or mobile stations equipped over transportation media. This work deals with the development, experimental startup with field test and critical data analysis of a brand new wearable system for microclimate and air quality investigation, just developed with the purpose to characterize livability environmental conditions which affect urban population wellbeing. To this aim, the experimental tool definition and the first field test are carried out in a historical city centre in Italy, where cluster analysis is performed in order to also identify the role of urban design in affecting key microclimate parameters such as air temperature, solar radiation, daylight, air pollution and pedestrian thermal comfort in general. The analysis showed that very site-specific environmental conditions may be detected while several environmental spheres are investigated by the novel wearable system in summer conditions.