How Buildings Shape the People Inside Them
We study how indoor environments affect the health, comfort and work of the people inside them, and we bring that work into the classroom. Our testbed, the Living Link Lab, follows people and buildings over months and years, and our field studies, AI tools and sensing platforms take the research into homes, workplaces and communities.
About Us
Smart and Healthy Buildings at UVA brings together research and teaching on how buildings shape the health, comfort and productivity of the people inside them, and on how buildings can be designed and run with those people in mind. It is led by Arsalan Heydarian and Somayeh Asadi (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Brad Campbell (Computer Science), with affiliated faculty across UVA.
Our testbed is the Living Link Lab, inside UVA's Link Lab, a 17,000-square-foot collaborative research facility in Olsson Hall. It began in 2018 with a National Science Foundation research infrastructure award. Environmental sensors, IoT devices, wearables and building automation data let us study how the spaces people occupy affect their behavior, cognition, health, comfort and productivity over weeks and months, not hours.
Beyond the testbed, our research includes field studies of flood-related indoor exposures in Puerto Rico and rural Alaska, digital twins and AI tools for facility managers, privacy in smart buildings, and low-power IoT systems built to last. The testbed is also a classroom: it supports five courses, including our Smart and Healthy Buildings course (CE 4070/6070), and has given more than 500 undergraduate, master's and doctoral students research and learning opportunities. Brad Campbell and Arsalan Heydarian also co-teach CPS 1: Cyber-Physical Systems Technology and Ethics, the core course of UVA's graduate certificate in cyber-physical systems.
Living Link Lab by the Numbers
2018 Year the testbed began
Built with a National Science Foundation research infrastructure award.
See the Living Link Lab