Overview
The design and implementation of smart buildings have been an emerging research area in recent years, and aim to develop building facilities that are able to automatically behave and intelligently respond to humans’ dynamic needs. One of the key research issues of modern smart building design is the disagreement among people about the room comfort, specifically, the room temperature setup. People in the same corporate or office building may have heterogeneous personal feelings about the room temperature, and hence these buildings are seldom comfortable for everyone. In particular, such situation could be even aggravated by the fixed control of air conditioning systems, which regulate room temperature through predetermined set-points. These systems hence fail to adapt to the actual humans’ needs but necessarily increase the energy footprint.

Our basic idea to addressing the above challenge is to seamlessly connect people to their indoor environment via their personal mobile devices, more specifically, smartphones, and adaptively adjust the room temperature setup based on the aggregated feedback from mobile users. The contributions of this project are three-fold:

  • Increased User Comfort: Building facilities behave automatically and intelligently to meet human needs
  • Increased Energy Efficiency of Buildings: Avoid unnecessary energy consumption that contradicts with the actual human needs
  • Increased Convenience of Surveillance and Control: Mobile users’ subjective feelings and feedback are automatically collected and reported by mobile devices without manual operations or excessive deployment of control interfaces.
App Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.utk.temperaturemontior&hl=en
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