PFI-RP: A Smart Building for Enhancing Human Performance, Comfort and Health

Award ID: 1827674

The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project includes enhancing the workers' performance, comfort, health and well-being and saves billions of dollars for healthcare. This project will produce a new approach to integrating physical and human behavioral factors within a smart building system that has a high potential for commercialization. It will involve K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, and also will be used for new curriculum development. Female and under-represented students will be encouraged to participate in this project. The project will provide critical insight into creating human-centered smart buildings. Research results will be disseminated through publication, software and data release and technology transfer to industrial partners. The partnership with industrial partners will make the research deliverables have potential for commercialization. This project will create the foundation to launch a new inter-disciplinary research initiative in cyber-physical systems with potential for high impact on the nation's workforce. The proposed project aims to build a human-centered context-aware responsive smart building that can provide personalized services to enhance the performance, comfort and health of occupants. The novelty of this project lies in its leveraging human behaviors in addition to the data from the physical world to provide context-aware automatic and personalized services that can better meet human needs. This smart building is unique by two features: 1) it provides personalized service rather than a universal service for all users; and 2) the building can automatically make context-aware adjustments to proactively meet user needs. This project consists of two innovations: 1) Social-based Context-aware Prediction/Response, and 2) Environmental Control for Human Health. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Jesus Soriano Molla