Improving the comfort assessment feedback rate in office buildings through the mobile app: design and evaluation

Supervisors: Julien Nembrini, Denis Lalanne

Student: Aleksandar Ilic

Project status: Finished

Year: 2019

With the recent technology advancements, many office buildings are being equipped with multiple sensors (temperature, energy, CO2, etc.), which leads to a significant amount of sensor-data that is often not utilized to its full potential. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Mobile User-Building Interface (MUBI) application, which allows the users to visualize the recorded building data on their mobile device, as well as to submit their subjective comfort assessment of the environment. The use of the push notifications allows to explicitly request the users to send their comfort assessment with the aim to increase the submission rate. Development was based on a used-centered design process which included a focus group session. The project was evaluated during a 2-week user experiment which involved 18 participants, and the evaluation results were analyzed qualitatively. The results provide interesting findings: (i) most of the feedback submissions were sent when the participants felt comfortable; (ii) push notifications proved to be effective; (iii) successful feedback submission rate was 94.5%; (iv) the results of the exit questionnaire indicate that the participants would use the MUBI app relatively frequent in the future. We hypothesized that the submission rate would be increased by showing the additional sensor-data visualizations to the users - but the evaluation results show that this did not have a significant impact on the overall feedback rate.

Document: report.pdf