Conference Editor
Jianshun Zhang; Edward Bogucz; Cliff Davidson; Elizabeth Krietmeyer
Keywords:
well-being, occupant satisfaction, smart buildings, comfort, smart sensing
Location
Syracuse, NY
Event Website
http://ibpc2018.org/
Start Date
24-9-2018 3:30 PM
End Date
24-9-2018 5:00 PM
Description
Occupant well-being is undergoing a surge of interest in both the research community and industry, as the potential benefits of increased levels of well-being become better quantified and understood. Well-being science itself is also constantly evolving, moving from the traditional negative view of depression and mental disorders as markers of well-being, towards the more positive notion of flourishing, which is feeling good and functioning well. This paper first sets out the key elements of well-being, as found in psychology literature. Surveys and interviews are the main methods used to capture the well-being of individuals and populations, yet completion rates can be low, occupants distracted or irritated by requests to complete surveys and the data infrequent or irregular. Instead, cameras emerge as a potential economic way to gain information about occupants. Their comfort, health and well-being can be monitored with a high frequency, low intrusion and low cost through the use of facial emotions and movements. To this end, a small pilot study is carried out to examine the effectiveness and practicality of data capture by cameras. Data from a new naturally ventilated office building in Cambridge, United Kingdom, is inspected alongside more traditional well-being assessment techniques. It finds that occupants quickly forget that they are being monitored by the cameras and are very engaged with the research, keen to see if it can help improve their workspace. The results and experience from this pilot study form the basis of a more extensive programme of investigations that are described at the end of this paper. The aspiration is to develop this method so that it can be deployed as part of a wider toolkit to holistically capture high quality information about the comfort, health, and well-being levels of building occupants.
Recommended Citation
Allen, Mark and Overend, Mauro, "Towards a New Way of Capturing Occupant Well-being" (2018). International Building Physics Conference 2018. 6.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14305/ibpc.2018.hf-1.06
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Towards a New Way of Capturing Occupant Well-being
Syracuse, NY
Occupant well-being is undergoing a surge of interest in both the research community and industry, as the potential benefits of increased levels of well-being become better quantified and understood. Well-being science itself is also constantly evolving, moving from the traditional negative view of depression and mental disorders as markers of well-being, towards the more positive notion of flourishing, which is feeling good and functioning well. This paper first sets out the key elements of well-being, as found in psychology literature. Surveys and interviews are the main methods used to capture the well-being of individuals and populations, yet completion rates can be low, occupants distracted or irritated by requests to complete surveys and the data infrequent or irregular. Instead, cameras emerge as a potential economic way to gain information about occupants. Their comfort, health and well-being can be monitored with a high frequency, low intrusion and low cost through the use of facial emotions and movements. To this end, a small pilot study is carried out to examine the effectiveness and practicality of data capture by cameras. Data from a new naturally ventilated office building in Cambridge, United Kingdom, is inspected alongside more traditional well-being assessment techniques. It finds that occupants quickly forget that they are being monitored by the cameras and are very engaged with the research, keen to see if it can help improve their workspace. The results and experience from this pilot study form the basis of a more extensive programme of investigations that are described at the end of this paper. The aspiration is to develop this method so that it can be deployed as part of a wider toolkit to holistically capture high quality information about the comfort, health, and well-being levels of building occupants.
https://surface.syr.edu/ibpc/2018/HF1/6
Comments
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