Energy-efficient retrofits embrace enhancement of the building envelope through climate control strategies, employment of building-integrated renewable energy technologies, and insulation for a sustainable city. Building envelope improvements with insulation is a common approach, yet decision-making plays an important role in determining the most appropriate envelope retrofit strategy. In this paper, the main objective is to evaluate different retrofit strategies (RS) through a calibrated simulation approach. Based on an energy performance audit and monitoring, an existing building is evaluated on performance levels and improvement potentials with basic energy conservation measures. The considered building is experimentally monitored for a full year, and monitoring data are used in calibrating the simulation model. The validation of the base model is done by comparing the simulation analysis with the experimental investigation, and good agreement is found. Three different retrofit strategies based on Intervention of minor (RS1), Moderate (RS2), and Major (RS3) are analyzed and juxtaposed with the base model to identify the optimal strategy of minimizing energy consumption. The result shows that total energy intensity in terms of the percentage reduction index is about 16.7% for RS1, 19.87 for RS2, and 24.12% for RS3. Hence, RS3 is considered the optimal retrofit strategy and is further simulated for a reduction in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and payback investigation. It was found that the annual reduction in CO₂ emissions of the building was 18.56%, and the payback period for the investment was 10.6 years.

The recent outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has given rise to diverse health issues due to its high transmission rate and limited treatment options. Almost the whole world, at some point of time, was placed in lock-down in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, with resulting psychological and economic sequela. As countries start to ease lock-down measures and reopen industries, ensuring a healthy workplace for employees has become imperative. Thus, this paper presents a mobile app-based intelligent portable healthcare (pHealth) tool, called i WorkSafe, to assist industries in detecting possible suspects for COVID-19 infection among their employees who may need primary care. Developed mainly for low-end Android devices, the i WorkSafe app hosts a fuzzy neural network model that integrates data of employees' health status from the industry's database, proximity and contact tracing data from the mobile devices, and user-reported COVID-19 self-test data. Using the built-in Bluetooth low energy sensing technology and K Nearest Neighbor and K-means techniques, the app is capable of tracking users' proximity and trace contact with other employees. Additionally, it uses a logistic regression model to calculate the COVID-19 self-test score and a Bayesian Decision Tree model for checking real-time health condition from an intelligent e-health platform for further clinical attention of the employees. Rolled out in an apparel factory on 12 employees as a test case, the pHealth tool generates an alert to maintain social distancing among employees inside the industry. In addition, the app helps employees to estimate risk with possible COVID-19 infection based on the collected data and found that the score is effective in estimating personal health condition of the app user.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is used to sense the environment, collect the data, and further transmit it to the base station (BS) for analysis. A synchronized tree-based approach is an efficient approach to aggregate data from various sensor nodes in a WSN environment. However, achieving energy efficiency in such a tree formation is challenging. In this research work, an algorithm named fuzzy attribute-based joint integrated scheduling and tree formation (FAJIT) technique for tree formation and parent node selection using fuzzy logic in a heterogeneous network is proposed. FAJIT mainly focuses on addressing the parent node selection problem in the heterogeneous network for aggregating different types of data packets to improve energy efficiency. The selection of parent nodes is performed based on the candidate nodes with the minimum number of dynamic neighbors. Fuzzy logic is applied in the case of an equal number of dynamic neighbors. In the proposed technique, fuzzy logic is first applied to WSN, and then min–max normalization is used to retrieve normalized weights (membership values) for the given edges of the graph. This membership value is used to denote the degree to which an element belongs to a set. Therefore, the node with the minimum sum of all weights is considered as the parent node. The result of FAJIT is compared with the distributed algorithm for Integrated tree Construction and data Aggregation (DICA) on various parameters: average schedule length, energy consumption data interval, the total number of transmission slots, control overhead, and energy consumption in the control phase. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is better in terms of energy efficiency.