Indoor Environment & Human Perception
Understanding and modeling the interaction between occupants and their indoor environments is a major focus area for the CHPB. The work involves faculty from both engineering and psychology who study human interactions with thermal, indoor air quality (IAQ), lighting, acoustic, and vibration conditions. The primary goals are to understand the influence of these conditions on occupant satisfaction, comfort, perceived IAQ (PIAQ), and performance in order to develop better building designs and controls and to work towards indoor environments that promote human health. The group has access to some very unique research facilities, including a perception-based engineering (PBE) laboratory to study combined impacts of lighting, acoustics, air quality, vibration, temperature, humidity and air flow on occupant perceptions and performance in a controlled manner, reconfigurable living laboratory offices that allow testing for impacts of new building technologies on human performance indices in a real-world setting, and IAQ chambers.
Facilities:
Sustainable Buildings Technology Laboratory (Living Laboratories)
Perception-Based Engineering Laboratory
Architectural Engineering Laboratory
Current Projects
- Automated 3-D Space Reconstruction and Occupancy Detection (Presence and Position) to Enable Efficient Building Controls Using a Low-Cost Stereo Camera System
- Development of a Human-Building Interactions Laboratory
- Long-Lasting, Low-Cost Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) Sensors for Interior Monitoring