Welcome to EdenAppLabs
EdenAppLabs comprises a team of academics who investigate using digital telephone apps as tools for environmental design teaching and quick measurements at tertiary level. Founded at the University of Edinburgh, EdenAppLabs comprises a suite of mobile applications for measuring daylight and thermal comfort. The Lab is seeking to develop an acoustics app to complement the existing range. PhD proposals in this area are welcome.
Founding team member, Ola is Professor of Architectural Research at Manchester School of Architecture. Her environmental design interests focus on thermal comfort and passive cooling particularly in tropical climates. She is also interested in passive design, renewable energy, and “off grid” systems for social infrastructure including schools and housing in the emerging world.
Co-founding team member Gillian Treacy is currently a lecturer and PhD candidate within the School of Design, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh. Gillian has been working in architecture and lighting practice since 2000. She has led international projects and achieved design awards including Scottish Design Awards 2016 winner in Lighting for her own practice. Gillian has been teaching design since 2005 and her PhD research explores design pedagogy. Her primary research interests lie within the fields of architecture, interiors and lighting with a keen interest in progressing environmental design, daylight and artificial lighting education for architectural designers.
Yiqiang Zhao is a team member and PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. His research is focusing on using deep learning to build personal thermal comfort model to improve indoor air quality and energy efficiency. He developed open-sourcedlow-cost Smart Thermal Comfort (STC) system including a distributed sensor set and mobile app to efficiently collect environment and subjective data (including behaviour). He also used this mobile app and sensors to test how psychological intervention influences thermal perception.
EdenApp Lighting is a mobile app that can measure lighting variables in different kinds of buildings. Combined with the use of the SensorTag™ sensor , it can measure illuminance (lux) and also automatically calculate daylight factor.
EdenApp Thermal Comfort, is a mobile app, developed using open source data, which can record the app owner’s personal thermal comfort response. This is done by its measurement of local environmental data; comprising temperature, humidity and local air movement across the body. With this a thermal comfort measure can be calculated and this can be compared to individualized feelings of comfort or discomfort.
Zhao, Y., Uduku, O., and Murray-Rust, D. (2017)
EdenApp Thermal Comfort: An mobile app for measuring personal thermal comfort. In Passive Low Energy Architecture - Design to Thrive.
Zhao, Y., Carter, K., Wang, F., Uduku, O., and Murray-Rust, D. (2018)
Self-Learning Framework for Personalised Thermal Comfort Model. In 10th Windsor Confernce - Rethink Thermal Comfort.
Treacy G. and Uduku O. (2014)
PTAS Research Award Report
Treacy G. and Uduku O. (2013)
“Environmental Design Analysis Models in Technology and Environment Teaching in Architecture Schools”, Opinion, Edinburgh Architectural Research Journal (EAR).
Uduku N. (2011)
IES Education Project, CIC Educational Consultancy Report, Glasgow CIC.
Principal Researcher: Ola Uduku
Co Researchers: D. Murray-Rust G. Treacy, Y. Zhao
KE Associates: IES Glasgow & Digicore Systems Edinburgh
The vision of the EdenAp project is to produce a suite of environmental analysis apps to be used as teaching tools, for students, architects and SMEs involved in environmental design and sustainable construction projects. As Prensky (2001) has suggested, today’s students have grown up in a world surrounded by digital media and devices. Thus if we are to support 21st century learning trends, we must accept that many of our students are “digital natives” or at the very least, digitally “experienced” and that the development of “digital scholarship” can be further enhanced using these now ubiquitous apps as digital tools for learning. This project thus has both educational and marketing objectives. In the first instance we hope to develop the suite of EdenAp environmental analysis teaching apps for higher education, with a view to licensing their use for higher education in the UK, and at a later stage, commercialising the product and releasing it to the public via apps platforms.
Total £12,750