Identification of environment- and context-specific key factors influencing the user’s thermal comfort

Abstract

The indoor climate conditions in a working environment are extremely important, since these affect the employees’ mental state and may lead to a higher or lower productivity. For this reason, the focus in the last years rests on developing sophisticated and adaptable HVAC control systems. The respective systems attempt usually to regulate the users’ thermal comfort while keeping the energy consumption low. Recently launched products in this field deliver promising but still perfectible results with space for improvement. This could be attributed to the degree of awareness of current control approaches and the fact that they take only a limited number of environmental (e.g., temperature, humidity) and no context-specific factors (e.g., human activity and emotional state) into account. In this work, we explore whether and to what extend a number of environment- and context-specific factors influence the users’ sense of well-being. For this purpose, we deployed a server-based survey framework and conducted a 8-week long field study in an office environment. After performing a number of descriptive and inferential statistical analysis methods on the resulting data, it can be shown that there exist several factors, apart from temperature and humidity, that are capable of affecting significantly the users’ thermal comfort. The results presented in this paper could support the development of an improved, context- and emotion-aware generation of HVAC control systems.