Thermal comfort support application for smart home control

Abstract

The main goal of smart home applications can be summarized as improving (or keeping) users' comfort maximizing energy savings. Holistic management and awareness about users' habits play fundamental roles in this achievement, as they add predictive, adaptive and conflict resolution capabilities to the home automation system. The present paper presents an application for the thermal comfort that utilizes information from habit profiles - occupancy, comfort temperature and comfort relative humidity - and is designed to be integrated within overall smart home approaches. The application pursues to keep outdoor air quality and thermal comfort controlling shading devices and ventilation elements in unoccupied times and exploiting unobtrusively persuasive technologies in occupied periods. This context aware pre-control phase paves the way to minimize heating and cooling costs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.