CIRIAF-Interuniversity Research Center on Pollution and Environment Mauro Felli, University of Perugia, 06125 Perugia, Italy.
Engineering Department, University of Perugia, 06125 Perugia, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 4;23(2):576. doi: 10.3390/s23020576.
The improvement of comfort monitoring resources is pivotal for a better understanding of personal perception in indoor and outdoor environments and thus developing personalized comfort models maximizing occupants' well-being while minimizing energy consumption. Different daily routines and their relation to the thermal sensation remain a challenge in long-term monitoring campaigns. This paper presents a new methodology to investigate the correlation between individuals' daily Thermal Sensation Vote (TSV) and environmental exposure. Participants engaged in the long-term campaign were instructed to answer a daily survey about thermal comfort perception and wore a device continuously monitoring temperature and relative humidity in their surroundings. Normalized daily profiles of monitored variables and calculated heat index were clustered to identify common exposure profiles for each participant. The correlation between each cluster and expressed TSV was evaluated through the Kendall tau-b test. Most of the significant correlations were related to the heat index profiles, i.e., 49% of cases, suggesting that a more detailed description of physical boundaries better approximates expressed comfort. This research represents the first step towards personalized comfort models accounting for individual long-term environmental exposure. A longer campaign involving more participants should be organized in future studies, involving also physiological variables for energy-saving purposes.
舒适度监测资源的改进对于更好地理解室内外环境中的个人感知至关重要，因此开发个性化的舒适度模型可以最大限度地提高居住者的舒适度，同时最小化能源消耗。不同的日常活动及其与热感觉之间的关系仍然是长期监测活动中的一个挑战。本文提出了一种新的方法来研究个体日常热感觉投票（TSV）与环境暴露之间的相关性。参与长期活动的参与者被要求每天回答一次关于热舒适感知的调查，并佩戴一个连续监测周围温度和相对湿度的设备。对监测变量的归一化日常分布和计算出的热指数进行聚类，以确定每个参与者的常见暴露分布。通过肯德尔 tau-b 检验评估每个簇与表达 TSV 之间的相关性。大多数显著相关性与热指数分布有关，即 49%的情况下，这表明更详细地描述物理边界可以更好地近似表达的舒适度。这项研究是朝着考虑个人长期环境暴露的个性化舒适度模型迈出的第一步。未来的研究应该组织更长时间的活动，让更多的参与者参与进来，并涉及生理变量，以达到节能的目的。
