The built environment serves humankind. Besides a human-centred design approach, human needs (comfort and health) should also be the centre point in the operational phase. However, human comfort and health needs related to indoor climate control are not static, but vary over time and also substantially differ between people. Hence, to effectively address the dynamic nature of human needs, current research focusses on innovative (personal) climate conditioning concepts and integrating user feedback with smart building automation. Looking at the future, artificial intelligence, e.g. via neural networks, will become key to develop models that understand (dynamic) user needs and can communicate with building automation platforms.
Dr. Shalika Walker, Post-doctoral researcher at TU Eindhoven
