Integration of occupant voting systems and smart home platforms for collecting thermal feedback in indoor environments

Abstract

The assessment of indoor thermal comfort is increasingly shifting from statistical to personalized models and therefore there is a growing interest in collecting feedback on occupants’ perceptions and preferences. Occupant Voting Systems (OVS) are emerging as a widely used tool in Post Occupancy Evaluations (POE) but the level of occupants’ interaction with these data collection devices, their scientific accuracy, and the integration of feedback data with building management systems, especially in residential buildings, still need to be further explored. This paper presents a study conducted on five dwellings, located in Italy, where smart home switches were used as feedback buttons to collect the thermal sensation of the occupants. These buttons were integrated into an open-source smart home platform, MOQA. The developed system is described in its technical features, highlighting the amount of information collected, the response rate and its interoperability with smart home systems. The results show that OVSs still have limitations in terms of occupant engagement and it is still rather complicated to correlate ratings with environmental variables. However, an easier integration, here described, with smart home systems would partially overcome these problems, turning the OVS into a useful tool for both users and research purposes.