Smart Approach for Investigation of Personal Thermal Comfort: A Case Study of Office Buildings

High-performance buildings are sensitive to the occupant’s impact with respect to the energy consumption of the various building systems or individual technologies used in buildings. Thermal comfort has got an important role in the occupant’s satisfaction level, and it is directly linked with building energy performance. Development of the smart and Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies allowed the possibility for further advancements in the field of personal thermal comfort, leading towards potential energy savings in the buildings via smart and advanced control of building energy systems. In this work, the conceptual approach, as well as the results of the short-term field investigation, were presented for the case of office buildings. The wearable sensors (smart bracelets) were attached to the occupants, enabling continuous monitoring of various influential parameters on the personal thermal comfort, such as skin wrist temperature and heart rate. The environmental thermal comfort parameters were also simultaneously measured (air temperature, relative air humidity and CO2 concentration), together with conducted field survey (subjective response from occupants) to find a correlation between subjective response and experimental readings. The proposed approach allowed a more complex and precise evaluation of the personal thermal comfort where gained field data could be useful for modelling of the personal thermal comfort, as an important basis for smart regulation of the building energy systems.