Development of a Platform to Monitor User's Comfort Degree for Intelligent Environments

Abstract

With the development of intelligent environments, people have increasing demands for comfortable living environments. The three major factors affecting users' comfort are thermal comfort, visual comfort and air quality. This paper presents a monitoring platform of comfort degree for intelligent environments based on ZigBee wireless sensor network that measures living environment's parameters and actively controls corresponding equipments according to the information collected and users' preferences. Wireless sensor network system is divided into three layers, the main node layer, function nodes layer and leaf nodes layer, respectively. The approach to routing is through a tree topology method. A Mini2440 development board is selected as the host computer, which communicates with the main node via serial interface. The monitoring platform presented in this paper is flexible, powerful, and scalable, which can be applied to the other monitoring fields with minor modifications.

Keywords

• Wireless sensor network
• Monitoring platform
• Intelligent environments
• Comfort degree
• Mini2440.