Measuring thermal comfort using wearable technology in transient conditions during office activities

Abstract

This paper presents an experiment for assessing thermal comfort of occupants in the built environment, from a subjective perspective, focusing on office environment; a dedicated measurement campaign using sensors for acquisition of physiological and environmental parameters was conducted. Skin temperature was measured with two sensors: a minimally invasive sensor for measuring wrist temperature, and a thermal camera to retrieve forehead temperature; simultaneously, heart rate variability was measured using a wearable device. 15 participants were exposed to dynamic changes of air temperature. Data was collected to measure the participants’ thermal sensation vote, with machine learning algorithms. Decision Tree provided higher performances, using a dataset made of wrist temperature, heart rate variability features and air temperature, with mean average error and mean absolute percentage error of 0.86 and 20.9%. The research contributes to thermal comfort personalization in the built environment, to improve well-being and productivity of occupants using minimally invasive sensor network.