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Research Newsletter - Issue 115: Open Research in Action

A Privacy-focused Data Solution for Understanding and Improving Indoor Environmental Quality in Social Housing 

Dr Valesca Lima, Dr Tracy Ildefonso (School of Law & Government),  Prof. Stephen Daniels, Joseph Mullally (School of Electronic Engineering)

 

Research Overview

The Irish social housing sector faces significant challenges due to ageing infrastructure and inadequate management, leading to poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ), including severe mould growth that negatively impacts resident health and incurs high costs. 

 

Shine project title

 

The Sustainable Homes Integrating Non-Intrusive Environmental Sensors Research Project (SHINE) aims to address this by deploying non-intrusive environmental sensors to provide real-time insights and actionable recommendations for residents and housing management. While these sensors offer a proactive approach to prevent issues like mould, a key research problem identified through stakeholder engagement is residents' dominant concern regarding data privacy. One of the SHINE’s project main objectives is to analyse policy gaps and maintenance challenges affecting housing sustainability and indoor environmental quality in Irish social housing.

Raw sensor data from households is highly sensitive, susceptible to sophisticated adversarial harvesting, de-anonymisation, and potential misuse, undermining user control and trust. The SHINE project responds by developing a privacy-by-design solution that processes sensitive sensor data at the edge, minimises unnecessary transmission, and ensures full user transparency and local control over their information.

 

Open Research Practices

The SHINE project incorporates several open research practices, primarily focusing on Open Methodologies, Open Code, and Stakeholder Engagement to promote trust and ensure ethical data usage. 

Our design methodology ensures that raw sensor measurements are processed directly by local on-board analytical models, preventing their storage or transmission, and can be seen in this link for one of the project publications. Crucially, the analytical algorithms employed are sourced from peer-reviewed academic literature, and their implementation and behaviour within the system are fully documented, transparent, and accessible to users and stakeholders alike. This commitment to an openly auditable path for environmental data flow reassures residents that their sensitive information remains within the household and that algorithms do not inadvertently exfiltrate hidden data signals. 

In addition to this, the SHINE team made strong efforts to include stakeholders’ insights, including those of social housing residents, in the design of the sensor and its privacy framework. This collaborative approach, combined with ensuring users have full transparency and local control over their data and what minimal, high-level reports are shared, exemplifies a robust form of public engagement that is critical for the responsible deployment and acceptance of technology in sensitive home environments.

 

Impact

The open research practices implemented in the project significantly enhance the potential reach, uptake, and engagement of our work. 

By prioritising and explicitly demonstrating data privacy, transparency, and user control through openly auditable methodologies, the project directly addresses residents' primary concerns, which is essential for ensuring that trust is present while also enabling the adoption of monitoring solutions in social housing This trust is fundamental for the successful adoption and long-term integration of these technologies into social housing policy, which can include improved health and well-being, environmental and economic benefits, policy design influence and transparent, user-controlled system, co-designed with stakeholders

 

Recent open access publications:

  • Lima, V., Ildefonso, T., Daniels, S; Mullally, J. (2026) Transforming social housing: moving beyond tenant blame to address systemic Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) challenges. Housing Studies 42(1). Link

  • Ildefonso, T., Lima, V., Daniels, S; Mullally, J. (2026). Co-creating Sustainable Innovations in Irish Social Housing Through Participatory Research. Sustainable Futures 11(1). Link

  • Lima, V., Ildefonso, T.M., Daniels, S. and Mullally, J. (2026) ‘Housing sustainability and indoor environmental quality: Policy gaps and maintenance challenges in Irish social housing’, Cities, 176, p. 107191. Link

  • Lima, V., Ildefonso, T., Daniels, S; Mullally, J. (2025) A Privacy-focused Data Solution for Understanding and Improving Indoor Environmental Quality in Social Housing From the SHINE Project. Data for Policy 2025 - Europe (DfP'25 Europe), Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands, 12-13 June 2025  Link