Living Room Environment Research Articles

Addressing personalized thermal comfort in residential settings: A novel dual-supply vent air conditioner

A new approach was proposed for meeting diverse thermal comfort demands of different occupants by using a dual-supply vent air conditioner with independent control of the air supply parameters at each vent to establish distinct thermal environments. The feasibility of this method was tested in a living room environment, and numerical simulation was conducted to explore the differences in thermal environment at various locations under different air supply temperatures, velocities, directions, and vent positions. The results indicated that, within the targeted air supply zone, the maximum temperature difference could reach around 2.5 °C. Considering the Cooling Effect of air velocity, the maximum Equivalent Temperature difference was around 4.5 °C, which could address the differences in common personalized thermal comfort preference. Utilizing the differential air supply velocities of different vents was an effective means of achieving diverse thermal environments, although attention should be paid to local thermal discomfort caused by drafts. This approach may offer a new perspective in addressing the differing thermal comfort preferences among occupants within the same residential room, additionally providing innovative insights for improving traditional air conditioning systems.

Improving the Restorative Potential of Living Environments by Optimizing the Spatial Luminance Distribution

Changing the spatial luminance distribution patterns has the potential to improve the restorative potential of indoor environments through spatial visual perception intervention, which is helpful to meet our growing need for psychological restoration and well-being. However, the efficiency, progress, and principles for improving the spatial luminance distribution of indoor environments have not been verified, and the reusable and restorative spatial luminance distribution patterns that can be applied to the restorative reserve levels created by the architectural configurations and dispositions of the different spaces have yet to be established. Using a living room environment as the typical space and a hotel room as the research subject, we conducted this study by setting up a control group for the assessment experiment, combining three subjective and objective measures: the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS), the eye-movement test, and the case interview. The results showed the following. (1) The spatial luminance distribution of artificial lighting can improve the PRS score by 30.9%. (2) The spatial luminance distribution of artificial lighting improves the restorative perception potential, which negatively correlates with the restorative reserve level of the environment (the correlation coefficient values were −0.405, p < 0.01). (3) The spatial luminance distribution elicited two visual cognitive responses: visual attraction and visual load, with the former being positively correlated with restorative perception (the correlation coefficient values were 0.288, p < 0.01), while the latter was negatively correlated (the correlation coefficient values were −0.264, p < 0.01). (4) The visual cognitive conclusions of spatial luminance distribution including the six dimensions present the visual characteristics of the status quo in the restorative spatial luminance distribution of artificial lighting. Based on the findings, this study starts from the optimization of visual attraction and visual load by improving both the restorative level and the degree of restorative perception, proposing a restorative spatial luminance distribution pattern of artificial lighting applicable to environments with different restorative reserve levels.

Augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the use of everyday objects as new media for enriching digital storytelling experiences, especially as they pertain to viewing television narratives in living room environments. Through a design ideation workshop, we develop a strategy for augmenting television narratives using interactive home appliances. The ideas obtained through the workshop revealed that interactive home appliances connected to television systems can serve as both input and output channels capable of delivering narrative elements as additional output and can support active viewer engagement in narrative manipulation. Another strategy involved mirroring the environments of television narratives with the physical world to enable spatial immersion into such narratives. Based on the strategies, we discuss the criteria valued by the designers when it comes to designating interactions between home appliances and television narratives and the critical aspects that should be considered in further configurations and applications of such strategies.

Small-Footprint Wake Up Word Recognition in Noisy Environments Employing Competing-Words-Based Feature

This paper proposes a small-footprint wake-up-word (WUW) recognition system for real noisy environments by employing the competing-words-based feature. Competing-words-based features are generated using a ResNet-based deep neural network with small parameters using the competing-words dataset. The competing-words dataset consists of the most acoustically similar and dissimilar words to the WUW used for our system. The obtained features are used as input to the classification network, which is developed using the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. To obtain sufficient data for training, data augmentation is performed by using a room impulse response filter and adding sound signals of various television shows as background noise, which simulates an actual living room environment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed WUW recognition system outperforms the baselines that employ CNN and ResNet models. The proposed system shows 1.31% in equal error rate and 1.40% false rejection rate at a 1.0% false alarm rate, which are 29.57% and 50.00% relative improvements compared to the ResNet system, respectively. The number of parameters used for the proposed system is reduced by 83.53% compared to the ResNet system. These results prove that the proposed system with the competing-words-based feature is highly effective at improving WUW recognition performance in noisy environments with a smaller footprint.

Ambient Intelligence in the Living Room.

The emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services unveiled new potentials for the domain of domestic living, where the line between “the computer” and the (intelligent) environment becomes altogether invisible. Particularly, the residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem that (a) enhances leisure activities by providing a rich suite of entertainment applications, (b) implements a home control middleware, (c) acts as an intervention host that is able to display appropriate content when the users need help or support, (d) behaves as an intelligent agent that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities, (e) presents a notification hub that provides personalized alerts according to contextual information, and (f) becomes an intermediary communication center for the family. This paper (i) describes how the “Intelligent Living Room” realizes these newly emerged roles, (ii) presents the process that was followed in order to design the living room environment, (iii) introduces the hardware and software facilities that were developed in order to improve quality of life, and (iv) reports the findings of various evaluation experiments conducted to assess the overall User Experience (UX).

Effects of chair vibration on indoor annoyance ratings of sonic booms.

The effects of perceptible whole-body vibrations on annoyance ratings of sonic booms and other impulsive environmental sounds experienced indoors were studied. Fifteen pairs of test subjects made annoyance ratings while seated in a living room environment. There were two chairs, one isolated from floor vibrations and the other not isolated, and every test subject rated all signals in both chairs. Halfway through each test session, subjects changed seats. Subjects who sat in the isolated chair first gave lower mean annoyance ratings in both halves of the test than subjects who sat in the non-isolated chair first. Annoyance predictions from models using both sound and vibration measures were closer to average annoyance ratings than predictions from a model using sound measures alone. Reformulation of the annoyance model revealed that the presence of perceptible vibration is equivalent to increasing acoustic metric Perceived Level by 4.8 dB when calculated on exterior signals and by 5.6 dB when calculated on interior signals.

The effects of observation of walking in a living room environment, on physical, cognitive, and quality of life related outcomes in older adults with dementia: a study protocol of a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundThe number of older adults with dementia is expected to increase. Dementia is not only characterized by a decline in cognition, also other functions, for example, physical functioning change. A possible means to decrease the decline in these functions, or even improve them, could be increasing the amount of physical activity. A feasible way hereto may be activation of the mirror neuron system through action observation. This method has already been shown beneficial for the performance of actions in, for example, stroke patients. The primary aim of this study is to examine the effect of observing videos of walking people on physical activity and physical performance, in older adults with dementia. Secondary, effects on cognition and quality of life related factors will be examined.Methods/DesignA cluster randomized controlled trial is being performed, in which videos are shown to older adults with dementia (also additional eligibility criteria apply) in shared living rooms of residential care facilities. Due to the study design, living rooms instead of individual participants are randomly assigned to the experimental (videos of walking people) or control (videos of nature) condition, by means of drawing pieces of paper. The intervention has a duration of three months, and takes place on weekdays, during the day. There are four measurement occasions, in which physical activity, physical functioning, activities of daily living, cognition, the rest-activity rhythm, quality of life, and depression are assessed. Tests for participants are administered by a test administrator who is blind to the group the participant is in.DiscussionThis study examines the effect of the observation of walking people on multiple daily life functions and quality of life related factors in older adults with dementia. A strength of this study is that the intervention does not require much time and attention from caregivers or researchers. A challenge of the study is therefore to get to know for how long residents watch the videos. However, the design implies a high feasibility of the study, as well as a high applicability of the intervention into daily care.Trial registrationNTR4708. Date of registration: 31 July 2014.

Characterization and Determination of PM2.5 Bound Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHS) in Indoor and Outdoor Air in Western Sierra Leone

Eleven airborne PM2.5 PAH concentrations were characterized in the kitchen, outdoor and living room environments in households that burn wood and charcoal fuels in Western Sierra Leone, during a survey that was conducted in September 2011. The average concentration of total PAHs (Σ11PAHs) was 1279.7 ng/m3 in kitchen, 41.2 ng/m3 in outdoor, 19.8 ng/m3 in living room for households burning wood while those burning charcoal was 96.5 ng/m3, 13.1 ng/ m3 and 8.9 ng/m3 in the kitchen, outdoor and living room, respectively. The percentage contribution of higher molecular weight PAHs to Σ11PAHs was about 25% higher compared to medium molecular weight PAHs for either household category in all three locations, with a somewhat different scenario for kitchens with wood stove. The ratio of indoor/ outdoor air of Σ11PAHs showed considerable variation among households burning charcoal (p=0.0021; t-test) relative to those burning wood, attributed to non-prolonged equilibrium between the two environments. Benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) equivalency results revealed that BaP and dibenzo(a,h)anthracene were the two most dominant compounds that contributed to more than 90% of the total carcinogenicity in all three environments for households burning wood and charcoal. The results suggest that kitchens, where biomass fuels are burnt continue to be a hazardous place for people of developing countries to spend their time.

A study of preferred colour rendering of light sources: Home lighting

This paper is part of a project to establish the optimal spectral power distributions of LED light sources for use in offices, commerce and homes. The present paper introduces the most important aspects of home lighting and provides recommendations for optimum spectra in the home environment. Visual experiments were carried out in a real scale kitchen/dining room and in a living room environment with the participation of nearly 100 observers. Results have been evaluated with the help of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a modified Thurstone method. As a result of the investigation, optimal spectral power distributions for the home environment are described.

New Screen Action and Its Memories

The experience of watching sport on television is changing with the proliferation of screens, the diversification of screen-based content, and the extension of interactive screen-facilitated communication. In recent decades, sport broadcast television viewing opportunities shifted from a primary reliance on a single “box in the corner” in the domestic living room environment to the availability of a multiplicity of television sets in different household spaces. Later, as television screen size increased, picture quality improved, and public viewing sites multiplied, new interactive screen-based devices emerged that have enabled audiences simultaneously to watch sport in many different spaces and to communicate about the experience to distant others. This “live” performance of mediated sport spectatorship parallels in some respects “live” mediated athletic performance, involving sharing the now and the making of digital memory.

Design of Intelligent Living Room Environment’s Control System with Intelligent Materials

The measurement and control system of an intelligent living room environment is introduced in this paper, which takes single-chip microcomputer STC89C52 as the core chip. The system uses the intelligent digital temperature and humidity materials SHT11 and light sensitive resistor to realize the detections of living room temperature, relative humidity and light intensity level with automatic control, in order to improve the living room comfort level. It's function reliable, simply constructed, and can achieve the automatic adjustment of living room environment parameters.

Pointing Angle Estimation for Human-Robot Interface

In this paper, we propose an approach to track and estimate user pointing direction in 3D Space. In the area of human-robot interaction, user communicates with service robot in their daily life activities to give commands and execute the given task accordingly. Therefore, the ability of user to gives command to service robot naturally can provide an interactive user interface system for real 3D space environment. For this purpose, we aim to perform pointing gesture tracking and after that estimate the user's pointing direction. Our method of pointing direction estimation is based on 3D orientation of hand and shoulder center of user. We make comparison with our previous method to find the best hypothesis. Experimental results show the angular error for the estimation of pointing direction is successfully improved from our previous method. As a result, our natural user interface system can manipulate 3D objects in living room environment thus providing intuitive robotic service for human robot interaction. I. INTRODUCTION Tracking of human gesture has been widely researched either in human-computer interaction or human-robot interaction. Besides voice, gesture is an example of platform to interfacing between human and robot intuitively and naturally. Pointing is one part of gesture which provides information and intention from human to service robot. Pointing-based user interface can easily indicate object and location for the robot delivering robot task in home environment. However, in the real environment, some ambiguity can occur and affect the performance of robotics service. The ambiguity in pointing gesture comes from the angular error in estimation of user's pointing direction particularly when certain objects is closely located. Due to the ambiguous pointing command, correct object and location cannot be identified thus service robot surely unable to deliver task successfully. To overcome this problem, we conduct several experiments on tracking of pointing arm and make comparison study to find the best hypothesis. In this paper, we present a robust tracking method to be used in pointing direction estimation. We measure the pointing angle from the position of hand with respect to the shoulder center. To obtain the 3D coordinates of pointing arm

Ubiquitous emotion-aware computing

Emotions are a crucial element for personal and ubiquitous computing. What to sense and how to sense it, however, remain a challenge. This study explores the rare combination of speech, electrocardiogram, and a revised Self-Assessment Mannequin to assess people's emotions. 40 people watched 30 International Affective Picture System pictures in either an office or a living-room environment. Additionally, their personality traits neuroticism and extroversion and demographic information (i.e., gender, nationality, and level of education) were recorded. The resulting data were analyzed using both basic emotion categories and the valence--arousal model, which enabled a comparison between both representations. The combination of heart rate variability and three speech measures (i.e., variability of the fundamental frequency of pitch (F0), intensity, and energy) explained 90% (p < .001) of the participants' experienced valence--arousal, with 88% for valence and 99% for arousal (ps < .001). The six basic emotions could also be discriminated (p < .001), although the explained variance was much lower: 18---20%. Environment (or context), the personality trait neuroticism, and gender proved to be useful when a nuanced assessment of people's emotions was needed. Taken together, this study provides a significant leap toward robust, generic, and ubiquitous emotion-aware computing.

EFFECTS AND ISSUES OF “COOKING IN A UNIT KITCHEN” IN SPECIAL NURSING HOMES FOR THE AGED

This studies the effects and Issues of “Cooking in a Unit Kitchen” in Special Nursing Homes for the Aged from the Study of 14 hours examination and analysis in Living Rooms and Behavior Tracking of cooking staffs. We could get following conclusions.1. Living Room environment in Special Nursing Homes is really important for the Aged from the data of 1) residents mean sojourn time in a Living Room was more than 7 hours and 2) mean mealtime was about 2 and half hours in 14 hours a day.2. Watch over the Aged and communicate with the Aged would be prospected when cooking staffs work in a unit kitchen, because 2 cooking staffs were working more than 10 hours a day in front of the Aged.3. Due to “Cooking in a Unit Kitchen”, cooking sounds created a good family environment in a Special Nursing Home for the Aged.

P-25: Acceptable Motion Blur Levels of a LCD TV Based on Human Visual System

Visual perception experiments were conducted to determine the limits of motion blur at moving pictures. The results showed that the Blurred Edge Width(BEW) of moving pictures should be below 3.4pixels (visual angle 4.2′) at 3H distance in a living room environment.

Hearing Aid Benefit in Everyday Environments

Hearing aid benefit was measured for three matched groups of eleven hearing-impaired subjects, each serving in one typical listening environment. Benefit was quantified in terms of improvement in intelligibility score for the Connected Speech Test. Each subject was individually fitted with three hearing aids, differing in nominal frequency response slope by a total of 8 dB/octave. Research questions centered on the amount of benefit typically realized in everyday environments and the interactions of this benefit with frequency response and/or visual cues. Results revealed: (1) mean benefit in a living-room type setting was about 24% and significantly greater than in a reverberant setting (7%) and a noisy setting (-1%); (2) despite the relatively large mean difference in benefit between the reverberant and noisy environments, the difference was not statistically significant (p greater than 0.05); (3) the addition of visual cues did not change hearing aid benefit in any tested environment; (4) there was no significant overall trend for any of the three different frequency-response slopes to give superior benefit in any environment; (5) 76% of the subjects achieved significantly different benefit (p less than 0.05) in at least one hearing aid condition when data were considered on an individual basis; and (6) articulation indices in the aided conditions did not successfully predict the observed within-subject benefit differences. Benefit was significantly related to speech reception threshold in the living-room environment. However, in the less favorable environments, benefit and hearing loss were not related despite the fact that benefit varied considerably across subjects.

Using multiple microphones and LMS adaptive beamforming to reduce interference in hearing aids from competing talkers in reverberant rooms

To reduce interference in monoaural hearing aids from spatially separated sound sources, the information from multiple microphones might be useful in enhancing the signal from a desired source for monaural presentation. The technique of Griffiths and Jim [IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat. AP‐30, 27–34 (1982)] was used to filter and combine microphone signals ins way that preserves signals arriving from straight ahead of the microphone array while minimizing output power from off‐axis signals. The filters adapt to the interference environment using a variation of the LMS (Widrow) algorithm. Although it adapts slowly (1 s), LMS approaches optimum performance in stationary, anechoic environments, providing a bound on performance in nonstationary, reverberant environments. In three simulated rooms, anechoic, living room, and conference room, with interferring babble 45° off‐axis and on‐axis target at − 12 dB/S/B, a two‐microphone system with 100‐point filters reduced the interference by 20, 12, and 4 dB, respectively. Informal listening indicated minimal degradation of the desired signal and substantial intelligibility improvement in anechoic and living room environments. [Work supported by NIH.]

Portable dehumidifiers for the control of condensation in housing

This paper describes both laboratory and field experiments to determine the effectiveness of portable dehumidifiers in reducing the risk of condensation and mould growth in dwellings. The performances of three dehumidifier models with different water extraction rates were investigated. The results indicated that: The smallest dehumidifier acted primarily as a low wattage heater; the two larger machines improved conditions in the bedroom in which they operated, but had little effect on the living room environment; noise was a problem so that the night-time use of the dehumidifier was restricted; laboratory experiments can be used to estimate the performance of dehumidifiers in housing with reasonable accuracy.

Researches in loudness measurement

CBS Laboratories has performed a fundamental study of loudness from which several results already have emerged. A new set of equal-loudness contours has been obtained using octave bands of "pink" noise in a simulated living room environment. The CBS Laboratories contours differ radically from the Fletcher-Munson contours. Forward vs. backward inhibition tests were performed, from which a new summation function was deduced. A new duration vs. loudness level function was obtained for octave bands ranging in frequency from 125 Hz to 8 kHz. These data are being incorporated in an instrument for measuring sensory loudness level.