Test rooms to study human comfort in buildings: A review of controlled experiments and facilities

Occupants’ comfort perception affects building energy consumptions. To improve the understanding of human comfort, which is crucial to reduce energy demand, laboratory experiments with humans in controlled environments (test rooms) are fundamental, but their potential also depends on the characteristic of each research facility. Nowadays, there is no common understanding for definitions, concepts, and procedures related to human comfort studies performed in test rooms. Identifying common feat...

A Global Building Occupant Behavior Database

This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patterns (i.e., presence and people count) and occupant behaviors (i.e., interactions with devices, equipment, and technical systems in buildings). Bric...

A new wearable monitoring system for investigating pedestrians' environmental conditions: Development of the experimental tool and start-up findings

Urban population is predicted to increase rapidly and massively in the next decades, by producing also the exacerbation of urban scale climate change imputable to anthropogenic actions, such as urban heat island. In this view, urban pedestrians assume a key role in determining city livability in dense built environments, typically much more polluted than suburban or rural areas. Despite that, urban heat island experimental studies are pretty focused on data collected by means of permanent mic...

Multi-domain human-oriented approach to evaluate human comfort in outdoor environments