Research Design Connection: In-Office Comfort
Kim and teammates studied worker comfort via data collected in a “typical” office building. As they report, “Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) provide individual occupants local heating and cooling to meet their comfort needs without affecting others in the same space…Recently developed Internet-connected PCS chairs…[can generate] continuous streams of heating and cooling usage data, along with occupancy status and environmental measurements…we carried out a study with PCS chairs…The data analysis shows that (1) local temperatures experienced by individual occupants vary quite widely across different parts of the building, even within the same thermal zone; (2) occupants often have different thermal preferences even under the same thermal conditions;…(4) PCS chairs produce much higher comfort satisfaction (96%) than typically achieved in buildings…PCS not only provide personalized comfort solutions but also offer individualized feedback that can improve comfort analytics and control decisions in buildings.” Joyce Kim, Fred Bauman, Paul Raftery, Edward Arens, Hui Zhang, …
Log in to Continue Reading
