Abstract
Abstract: People spend most of their day in buildings, and a large portion of the energy in buildings is used to control the indoor environment for creating acceptable conditions for occupants. However, majority of the building systems are controlled based on a ‘one size fits all’ scheme which cannot account for individual occupant preferences. This leads to discomfort, low satisfaction and negative impacts on occupants’ productivity, health and well-being. In this paper, we describe our vision of how recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning can be used to add intelligence to an office desk to personalize the environment around the user. The smart desk can learn individual user preferences for the indoor environment, personalize the environment based on user preferences, and act as an intelligent support system for improving user comfort, health and productivity. We briefly describe the recent advances made in different domains that can be leveraged to enhance occupant experience in buildings and describe the overall framework for the smart desk. We conclude the paper with a discussion of possible avenues for further research.
Highlights
The office workplace has evolved over the past decades due to multiple factors, including changes in the nature of work, digitization, integration of ergonomics in space design, cost of building and maintaining office spaces, and the drive to improve employee productivity
We present our vision for improving comfort, health and productivity by leveraging recent advancements in sensing technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) to create a smart desk for monitoring, controlling and personalizing the local indoor office environment
Existing Building Management Systems (BMS) and Building Automation Systems (BAS) rely on zone level monitoring of an environment and do not consider individual preferences
Summary
The office workplace has evolved over the past decades due to multiple factors, including changes in the nature of work, digitization, integration of ergonomics in space design, cost of building and maintaining office spaces, and the drive to improve employee productivity. New algorithms that consider the effects of local heating and cooling systems on user thermal comfort need to be developed for successful personalization of thermal comfort at the desk Lighting is another IEQ (indoor environmental quality) variable that is highly related to occupant comfort and productivity. Task-specific lighting can be used to promote productivity in the short term (Juslén et al, 2007), and lighting that is close to the natural light cycle can be used to reduce the negative impacts on the circadian rhythm (Pauley, 2004; Rea and Figueiro, 2018) Previous methods, such as the ones developed by Despenic et al or Sadeghi et al provide a good starting point for learning individual preferences of the user. These applications are beyond the scope of this paper, a visualization dashboard could be an important tool for these applications as well
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