Controlling indoor environments based on wearable sensor measurements
During this project, the possibility of using wearable sensor devices for thermal comfort monitoring is explored.
People in developed countries spend the majority of their lives indoors, which suggests that the quality of built environments has a substantial effect on well-being, performance, and overall quality of life. Along with energy conservation, providing comfortable conditions is the main objective for indoor environment control.
Great effort has been made to develop control solutions to minimize energy consumption without reducing comfort. Comfort is taken into account in the current indoor environment standards. The required conditions for acceptable thermal comfort, for instance, have been defined in terms of various physical and physiological variables in addition to the indoor temperature range.
The most widely used index for thermal comfort, Fanger's Predicted Mean Vote, is based on the physics of heat exchange between the occupants and their environment. It provides a practical framework to assess thermal comfort of a large population on average. More recent thermal comfort research has focused on modeling individuals' thermal comfort with environmental and/or physiological variables.
Wearable devices have become increasingly popular in consumer use during the past decade. In addition to the traditional fitness and sports applications, wearable devices are now used for several new purposes, such as monitoring stress and sleep quality. During this project, the possibility of using wearable sensor devices for thermal comfort monitoring is explored. The main objective of the project is to develop software for automatic collection of data from multiple sensor sources. Based on the combined measurements from a wearable sensor and room temperature and humidity sensors, a data-driven model is constructed to estimate the user's thermal comfort in real time. Moreover, the suitability of wearable sensors for indoor environment control in general is discussed