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CaPITeN is a low-cost, field-ready platform designed to investigate thermo-visual comfort in tropical buildings under real operating conditions. It combines individualised physiological and subjective monitoring with time-synchronised environmental measurements, including thermal, visual, and hygro-aeraulic parameters, recorded on a common timeline. The platform follows a structured measurement protocol integrating pre-experimental sociodemographic and personality data, continuous physico-physiological monitoring, and repeated thermo-visual comfort assessments. A dual-storage strategy, combining cloud-based transmission and local backups, ensures robust data acquisition. CaPITeN was deployed in a naturally lit and ventilated university classroom, achieving over 99 % data completeness despite transient communication losses. Reliability tests showed mean absolute errors below 1 C for temperature, 0.25 m/s for air velocity, and 6 lx for illuminance. Used in this study for the time-resolved, in-situ analysis of coupled thermo-visual perceptions, CaPITeN relies on a modular, reproducible architecture that could readily be extended to investigate other sensory modalities. It therefore provides a robust methodological framework for multivariate comfort studies and the development of large-scale comfort databases adapted to tropical climates.
Rakotoarivelo et al. (2026) studied this question.