Steven Jonas

February 21, 2017

Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.”

One goal of building design is to increase individual comfort. However, this poses a problem. Everyone is different. For instance, what should the temperature be set at? There is no one temperature that is comfortable for everyone. It doesn’t work to try find a temperature that is pleasant to the largest number of people. As Stefano puts it, it is like going around and measuring everyone’s foot to get an average, say 9, and then dictating that everyone wear size 9 shoes to the office.

So how does this connect with Quantified Self? Stefano and his colleagues have embarked on a series of studies to better understand people’s individual preferences for their environments and they are doing it with QS tools. The first study was fairly simple. They tracked the ambient temperature and air quality of the person’s surroundings and used an app for feedback on whether the environment was “acceptable” or not. Carbon dioxide and temperature measurements were taken throughout the day, while the person was in the car, at work, the restaurant, etc.

Stefano and his colleagues noticed a couple things. One is that there was higher exposure to CO₂ in air conditioned rooms as opposed to naturally ventilated rooms. While Stefano says that this CO₂ level is not a concern in of itself, it correlates with other pollutants, such as, airborne transmitted diseases (e.g., influenza).

Despite these data, Stefano and his colleagues found that just recording the environment gave him a limited ability to predict a person’s comfort. He is hoping, and the focus of his next study, is that by getting a person’s QS data (heart rate and body temperature), this predication ability will improve, making it easier to personalize a space’s comfort for each individual.

For Stefano, all of this is in support of a larger cause, climate change. He was saddened to discover that nearly 40% of greenhouse emissions come from buildings. He hopes that by building better models for personal comfort by using QS tools, he can help people enjoy their environments more, while minimizing the environmental impact.

You can see the entire video of his talk at his QS project page.

Here are links to some of Stefano’s papers:

• Occupant satisfaction in LEED and non-LEED certified buildings
• Quantitative relationships between occupant satisfaction and satisfaction aspects of indoor environmental quality and building design
• Real-Time Monitoring of Personal Exposures to Carbon Dioxide

Get your tickets for QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in lovely Amsterdam. It’s a perfect event for seeing the latest self-experiments, debating the most interesting topics in personal data, and meeting the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are only a few early-bird discount tickets left. We can’t wait to see you there.