Human interaction with smart heating can improve comfort and save energy
Designing for Healthy, Affordable, and Sustainable Human-HVAC Interactions for Heating in Smart Homes
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and SocietyMultimediaSocial and Information Networks
Summary
Heating homes during winter can be expensive, energy-consuming, and sometimes unhealthy for vulnerable people like older adults or those with allergies. The authors studied how people live with smart heating systems to understand what makes them comfortable and how these systems affect indoor air quality. They also used virtual reality (VR) to test heating and air-quality setups and then created physical devices to help people better control their environments. Their work aims to make smart heating systems easier to use, healthier, and more affordable, especially for people with specific needs.
HVACsmart homesthermal comfortindoor environmental qualityvirtual realityenergy efficiencydigital fabricationdistributed sensingvulnerable groupshuman-computer interaction
Authors
Delong Korus-Du
Abstract
As geopolitical tensions, energy crises, and energy-intensive AI infrastructure intensify concerns about demand, affordability, and resilience, communities increasingly encounter these challenges through everyday energy practices, particularly winter heating. Against this background, the doctoral exposé, "Designing Human-HVAC Interaction for Healthy, Affordable, and Sustainable Heating in Smart Homes", is structured around four chapters. First, a multidisciplinary literature review defines and positions Human-HVAC Interaction, focusing on heating in smart homes. Second, longitudinal living lab studies with design probes examine everyday heating practices, thermal comfort, and indoor environmental quality, with attention to thermally vulnerable groups such as older adults, pregnant or menopausal women, parents with infants, and people affected by allergies or airborne pollutants. Third, a VR-based smart home demonstrator explores how heating and IEQ scenarios can be prototyped and evaluated as a virtual living lab, while critically examining the limits of representing bodily indoor climate conditions through VR. Fourth, follow-up design studies examine how VR-based insights can be translated into physical-digital prototypes that combine digital fabrication, distributed environmental sensing, and diverse interface forms for critical heating and IEQ contexts. The thesis aims to contribute a design-oriented understanding of Human-HVAC Interaction by building from a multidisciplinary literature review to empirical living lab and co-design studies, VR-based prototyping, and physical system development, examining how smart home users make sense of, negotiate, and respond to smart HVAC system.