Indoor Thermal Comfort Collection of People with Physical Disabilities

Abstract

Indoor thermal comfort monitoring is becoming a crucial research topic to improve not only the occupants' comfort but also the energy consumption, and thus the building sustainability. Existing works focus on real time thermal comfort assessment of people that are performing some activities and able to answer a questionnaire. However, few works deal with thermal comfort for people with physical disabilities which may have different thermal requirements from those without physical disability, due to the disability itself. Furthermore, the remote and constant monitoring amenities are not established yet, properly. To overcome this, Internet of Things (IoT) can be used, which would introduce more flexibility to monitor residential building of these population from anywhere. As a first step, we aim to provide remote availability of thermal comfort information from A.P.E.I buildings of Troyes city11A.P.E.I stands for Association des Parents d'Enfants Inadapts, is an association of parents of in-adapted children and people with physical disabilities., located in east of France, in order to enable remote monitoring and assessment of thermal comfort in these residential buildings. To do so, a complete IoT architecture is proposed. This architecture is based on sensor devices and permits to collect data, to be transferred and processed in the Cloud infrastructure for an adequate decision-making. Moreover, we optimize sensors deployment in addition to the data collection process while ensuring high data collection accuracy. Numerical results show the efficiency and the reliability of our schemes.