Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies for Managing Indoor Radon Risk Exposure: Applications, Opportunities, and Future Challenges
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
NICE AND INTERESTING WORK
I SUGGEST
RESHAPE THE TITLES FOR THE PARAGRAPHS, FOR EX INTRODUCE CONCLUSIONS IN STEAD OF 'FINAL SUMMARY'- AND RESPECT THE CLASSIC 'METHODOLOGY', RESULTS, DISCUSSIONS- AS USUAL
TRY TO PRESENT MORE HIGH LEVEL SCIENCE, FOR EX TURN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH INTO SCOPE:
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the relevant concepts and legal framework as well as an overview to the compatibility between indoor radon exposure and building’ energy efficiency improvement. Section 3 describes the materials and methods. Section 4 reviews the concepts and literature, in terms of related work to state-of-the art monitoring technologies and the techniques for indoor radon mitigation. Section 5 is related to the critical analysis of results and its discussion. In the end, section 6 draws conclusions and points to future work
Author Response
Dear reviewer
We are uploading our point-by-point response to the comments below (response in red, text added to the original manuscript in blue) and an updated manuscript with the revisions marked up using the “Track Changes” function in MS Word, as requested by the editor.
Author response:
Thank you for your suggestion. We agree with your comment and, indeed, consider it important to highlight the context of the work within a higher-level scientific approach. In this sense, we paid special attention to the systematization of the scope.
Author action:
To respect the classic methodology, we have reshaped the titles of the paragraphs to the following:
- Discussion
- 1. Opportunities and Future Challenges
- 1.1. Opportunities
- 1.2. Future Challenges
- Conclusions
We updated the manuscript by replacing the cited paragraph. The following text has been added to the introduction and has been marked in red in the original manuscript.
This article overviews the most relevant concepts and the legal framework regarding indoor radon exposure, as well as its relationship with the building's energy efficiency, followed by the description of the adopted research methodology. Following, a review regarding state-of-the-art concepts, techniques, and technologies for indoor radon management is presented. Lastly, a critical analysis of the obtained results is undertaken, and a final discussion is put forward with a focus on identifying current opportunities and future challenges within the topic.
Best regards,
Paulo Barros et al.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
It is an interesting review manuscript which present a survey of recent studies (in a past few years) related to design and implementation of Internet of Thing (IoT) technologies for managing indoor radon risk exposures. These IoT ecosystems allow the integration of various sensors, data acquisition and computing as well as communication protocols capabilities into low-cost and small-scale devices which are used as specific Cyber Physical Systems for online and real-time radon monitoring. The architectures of these systems, communication technologies and hardware requirements with special attention to radon sensors were analyzed and close insight to the state-of-the-art IoT based systems for radon monitoring and management has been provided.
The manuscript itself is well written and very well organized. The title reflects the subject of the manuscript. The abstract is informative and describe the objectives, results, and conclusions of this review manuscript. The tables and their captions are clear and understandable. The cited references are relevant, correct and properly used.
NOTES:
- On page 3, line 106 (and throughout the whole manuscript): the unit Bq.m-3 should be rewritten as “Bq m-3” or “Bq/m3” (as pCi/L is written). Furthermore, this unit represent the quantity of radon activity concentration.
- On page 3, line 134: maybe the word “increment” should be replaced by the word “increase”.
- On page 4, line 181: the beginning of the sentence “Already In the …” should be written as “Already in the …”
- On page 5, line 219: the word “airspeed” should be replaced by the word “air exchange rate”; if I correctly understood this sentence and list of parameters which defined the indoor thermal conditions.
- On page 10, line 414: the word “al-lowed” should be written as “allowed”.
- On page 11, line 467: the sentence “… environments. mainly …” should be written as “… environments, mainly …” if I correctly understood this sentence.
- On page 12, line 489: the reference “Alvarellos et al, …” is the reference [75] and should be noted.
- On pages 13-16: in the Table 4, the unit of “Overall power consumption” is written as (mA) and this quantity represent energy. Therefore, the unit should be in J, kWh or equivalent.
Author Response
Dear reviewer
We are uploading our point-by-point response to the comments below (response in red) and an updated manuscript with the revisions marked up using the “Track Changes” function in MS Word, as requested by the editor.
Author response:
Thank you for your suggestion. We agree with your comment and to improve the manuscript we have made all the suggested changes.
Author action:
We updated the manuscript by rewriting all cited notes according to the suggestions (marked in red in the original manuscript).
Best regards,
Paulo Barros et al.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
