Center for the Built Environment

There is limited scientific evidence on what is the optimal sampling period to measure skin temperature in longitudinal thermal comfort studies, and how this sampling period selection affects the results. iButtons® are among the most widely used wireless sensors in field and lab studies to measure skin temperature, since they are accurate, reliable, and cause minimal discomfort. However, their use is significantly limited by their memory capacity. We aimed to determine what is the optimal sampling period of skin temperature in studies which use iButtons®. We measured wrist skin temperature of 14 participants at 60 s intervals for a period of 1 month and wrist temperature of 5 participants at 20 s intervals for a week. Results showed that the selection of a 300 s sampling period would provide reasonably accurate results while limiting the number of times data needs to be downloaded.