Affect-aware thermal comfort provision in intelligent buildings

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, energy-efficient thermal comfort system in smart buildings that personalizes comfort models using HRV and population data, significantly improving accuracy over generic models.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid approach combining person-specific data with population samples to enhance thermal comfort modeling in intelligent buildings.

Findings

Double the accuracy of generic models (from 47.77% to 96.11%) with only 400 calibration samples.

Effective use of neck-coolers and HRV for personalized thermal comfort perception.

Practical real-time system implementation with identified advantages and limitations.

Abstract

Predominant thermal comfort provision technologies are energy-hungry, and yet they perform crudely because they overlook the requisite precursors to thermal comfort. They also fail to exclusively cool or heat the parts of the body (e.g., the wrist, the feet, and the head) that influence the most a person's thermal comfort satisfaction. Instead, they waste energy by heating or cooling the whole room. This research investigates the influence of neck-coolers on people's thermal comfort perception and proposes an effective method that delivers thermal comfort depending on people's heart rate variability (HRV). Moreover, because thermal comfort is idiosyncratic and depends on unforeseeable circumstances, only person-specific thermal comfort models are adequate for this task. Unfortunately, using person-specific models would be costly and inflexible for deployment in, e.g., a smart building because a system that uses person-specific models would require collecting extensive training data from each person in the building. As a compromise, we devise a hybrid, cost-effective, yet satisfactory technique that derives a personalized person-specific-like model from samples collected from a large population. For example, it was possible to double the accuracy of a generic model (from 47.77% to 96.11%) using only 400 person-specific calibration samples. Finally, we propose a practical implementation of a real-time thermal comfort provision system that uses this strategy and highlighted its advantages and limitations.