Long-term thermal comfort monitoring using wearable devices

Abstract

The improvement of comfort monitoring resources is pivotal in better understanding personal perception in indoor and outdoor environments. Different daily routines and their relation to the thermal sensation remains a challenge in long-term monitoring campaigns. This paper presents a new methodology to investigate the correlation between the mean daily Thermal Sensation Vote (TSV) and the daily mean normalized temperature, for different participants engaged in a long-term monitoring campaign. The participants answer a daily survey about thermal comfort perception and wore a device to measure temperature and relative humidity information from the environment in their surroundings. The normalized temperature data was chosen as a criterion to the clusterization process, followed by a correlation evaluation between TSV and normalized temperatures for each cluster. The variables only present moderate and strong correlation in two specific cases for different subjects, one for the cluster with lower thermal amplitude during the day and one for the cluster with moderate amplitude during the day, respectively. A longer campaign involving more participants should be organized in future studies, involving also physiological variables.