Tuesday, June 27, 2017: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Fundamentals and Applications
Chair:
Mark Jackson, Ph.D., McCree Consulting
Technical Committee: 2.1 Physiology and Human Environment
CoSponsor: 1.5 Computer Applications
Modern technologies help provide a high potential for sensing and integrating human factors, such as an individual’s real-time environmental preference and his/her physiological responses within a building system control context. Based on its technical merit, Human-Building Integration (HBI) becomes an emerging research domain for establishing novel thermal comfort models and adopting advanced computational algorithms. Accordingly, a better understanding of the principle of HBI is essential for optimizing a HVAC system’s performance by using the human body as a component of an integrated building system. This seminar addresses pertinent HBI technical features and their potential for real-world application.
1 Thermal Comfort in Health Care: The Need for Physiological Feedback
 |
Rodrigo Mora, Ph.D., British Columbia Institute of Technology |
Thermal comfort quality impacts health care workers’ outcomes and patients’ well-being. However, unlike any other type of indoor environments there is often a great variability in activity levels and health condition among occupants in a health care space that makes it difficult to achieve acceptable conditions for certain groups of occupants without sacrificing other groups. This seminar examines types of wearable sensors, their requirements and mappings in assessing individual thermal comfort and how such individual comfort data can be used to drive the operation of personalized and room indoor climate systems in real-time.
2 Using Occupants’ Control Behavior with Internet-Connected Personal Comfort System to Predict Individuals’ Thermal Preference
 |
Joyce Kim, University of California, Berkeley |
Occupants interact with thermal control devices available in buildings to address their comfort needs/desire; hence, the resulting behavior is an expression of one’s thermal preference. The new generation Personal Comfort System(PCS) with wireless connectivity offers a continuous stream of individuals’ heating and cooling usage data along with occupancy and environmental measurements in real time. This presentation summarizes findings from a field study of 40PCS heated and cooled chairs in an office building and reports the predictive performance of personal comfort models developed from continuous PCS data. Proposed models show an improvement of individuals’ comfort predictions by 20-30% compared to PMV.
3 Bio-Sensing Environmental Control: Data-Driven Thermal Sensation Prediction as a Function of Local Body Skin Temperature
 |
Joon-Ho Choi, Ph.D., University of Southern California |
Since the human body is governed by the thermoregulation principle to balance the heat flux between the ambient thermal condition and the body itself, skin temperature has a significant role in maintaining the physiological principle. Therefore, the author investigated the potential use of skin temperature and its technical parameters to establish a thermal sensation. This seminar discusses optimally combined skin temperature information collected from selected body areas, and examines how much reliable and applicable the designated skin temperatures are for estimating individual thermal sensations.