Towards Online Personalized-Monitoring of Human Thermal Sensation Using Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Thermal comfort and sensation are important aspects of building design and indoor climate control, as modern man spends most of the day indoors. Conventional indoor climate design and control approaches are based on static thermal comfort/sensation models that view the building occupants as passive recipients of their thermal environment. To overcome the disadvantages of static models, adaptive thermal comfort models aim to provide opportunity for personalized climate control and thermal comfort enhancement. Recent advances in wearable technologies contributed to new possibilities in controlling and monitoring health conditions and human wellbeing in daily life. The generated streaming data generated from wearable sensors are providing a unique opportunity to develop a real-time monitor of an individual’s thermal state. The main goal of this work is to introduce a personalized adaptive model to predict individual’s thermal sensation based on non-intrusive and easily measured variables, which could be obtained from already available wearable sensors. In this paper, a personalized classification model for individual thermal sensation with a reduced-dimension input-space, including 12 features extracted from easily measured variables, which are obtained from wearable sensors, was developed using least-squares support vector machine algorithm. The developed classification model predicted the individual’s thermal sensation with an overall average accuracy of 86%. Additionally, we introduced the main framework of streaming algorithm for personalized classification model to predict an individual’s thermal sensation based on streaming data obtained from wearable sensors.

Keywords

• thermal sensation
• adaptive model
• personalized model
• machine leaning
• support-vector-machine
• adaptive control
• streaming algorithm