Environmental Monitoring in Built Environment Through Wearable Devices: a Bibliometric Review

Wearables are mainly used for commercial purposes to enhance smartphone functionality by enabling payment for commercial items or monitoring physical activity. As emerged from a recent systematic review, many research studies focused on using wearable devices for environmental monitoring of the built environment. Those studies showed that, among the thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality environmental factors, the last one is the most considered when using wearables, even though in combination with some others. Another relevant finding is that of the acquired studies, in only one, the authors shared their wearables as an open-source device, and it will probably be necessary to encourage researchers to consider opensource to promote scalability and proliferation of new wearables customized to cover different domains. In this case, with a bibliometric review, it was possible to complete the analysis by answering some of most statistical aspects: what are the most important authors involved in this domain of research? What are the most relevant sources? What is the geographical coverage and the collaboration among different Countries? What is the conceptual structure of the considered topic? The methodology used to answer the above questions is based on a bibliometric review using a specific package developed for R environment: bibliometrix.