Since people spend more than 80% of their lives in buildings or other enclosures, comfortable indoor environments are essential in sustaining the quality of life and saving energy. Personalized ventilation can control personal surrounding temperature to provide comfort for everyone with minimal energy consumption. It is especially applicable in modern dense office buildings. However, one of the key issues with personalized ventilation is how to detect each person's thermal comfort, and according to their demand of thermal sensation automatically provide a comfortable environment. It requires an effective and easy-to-use tool to measure thermal sensation. According to Fanger's predicted mean vote model, people's metabolic rate has a significant impact on their thermal comfort. Bu...[ Read more ]

Since people spend more than 80% of their lives in buildings or other enclosures, comfortable indoor environments are essential in sustaining the quality of life and saving energy. Personalized ventilation can control personal surrounding temperature to provide comfort for everyone with minimal energy consumption. It is especially applicable in modern dense office buildings. However, one of the key issues with personalized ventilation is how to detect each person's thermal comfort, and according to their demand of thermal sensation automatically provide a comfortable environment. It requires an effective and easy-to-use tool to measure thermal sensation. According to Fanger's predicted mean vote model, people's metabolic rate has a significant impact on their thermal comfort. But in conventional application, a person's metabolic rate is assumed to be constant because of the high cost and inconvenience of monitoring an individual’s metabolic rate. In this study, a portable device was developed for human metabolic rate, heat loss measurement and thermal comfort estimation. Heart rate as a direct function of oxygen demands for metabolism was measured to calculate the metabolic rate. And the heat loss from skin to environment was measured to improve the accuracy of metabolic rate calculation from heart rate. An aspirating system was designed to measure the overall heat loss including the insensitive and sensitive perspiration effect on the skin.