Special issue on AI-powered indoor thermal comfort for people with physical disabilities

Introduction:

People spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, and almost 70% of that time is spent at home. According to the Office of National Statistics of the United Kingdom, there were more than 50,100 excess winter deaths during the 2017/18 winter season. This demonstrates that well-being is strongly affected by indoor comfort. Real-time assessment/monitoring of thermal comfort is essential for improving indoor climates for building occupants, as well as ensuring sustainable and efficient energy consumption in residential buildings. Existing studies have applied different indexes, such as predicted mean vote (PMV) and predicted percentage dissatisfied (PPD), to achieve this goal. However, few of these studies have considered disabled people, despite the potential for their impairments to present significantly different thermal requirements. In addition, people with disabilities can experience difficulties in expressing their comfort, further complicating thermal assessment and monitoring.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is opening new research directions in this field; for example through machine and deep learning techniques. This special issue brings together researchers from industry and academia to explore recent advances in exploiting AI techniques to optimise the monitoring/assessment/regulation of the indoor thermal comfort of disabled people.

Topics covered:

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• AI-enabled thermal comfort monitoring, assessmentand regulation for disabled people
• AI-enabled thermal comfort towards zero energy in buildingsinhabited by disabled people
• AI-empowered thermal comfort in the context of smart buildings and IoT for disabled people
• AI-based measurement of thermal comfort fordisabled people
• AI-enabled studies on the impact of the disability on the thermal comfort of disabled people
• AI-enabled studies on the thermal comfort requirements of disabled people
• AI-enabled studies on the digitalisation of buildings fordisabled people
• AI-based outdoor comfort impact on the indoor thermal comfort of disabled people
• AI-enabled indoor thermal comfort impact on the productivity and work performance of disabled people
• AI-enabled building sustainability for disabled people

Important deadlines:

• Submission deadline: 31 December 2022
• Publication date: 30 June 2023

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All articles should be submitted online; please select AI-powered indoor thermal comfort on submission.

Guest Editors:

• Dr. Bouziane Brik, Bourgogne University, France. Email: Bouziane.brik@u-bourgogne.fr(Lead)
• Dr. Eva Barreira, University of Porto – Portugal. Email: barreira@fe.up.pt