A living laboratory study in personalized automated lighting controls

Abstract

We report on an experimental case study of personalized lighting controls built on top of an infrastructure designed to enable rapid development of applications in commercial buildings. Our personalized lighting controls (PLC) use an existing standard commercial building lighting automation system and require no new hardware to deploy. PLC presents occupants with a "shared virtual light switch" accessible online and easily viewable on smart phones by scanning a QR code. It embodies three important design principles: individual empowerment with localized human-centered resolution, token effort for energy consumption and return to a low-power state when inactive. After deploying our lighting controls on two new floors of a large research building on campus, we show a sustainable reduction in lighting energy of 50% to 70% on both floors over 12 weeks, continuing to this day. These savings are found to come from a combination of reducing brightness and keeping lights on less often, especially during evenings and weekends.

Vuur: Exploring Shared Interaction with Light

“…While lighting systems that turn on when motion or darkness is detected have been widely implemented to reduce energy consumption [15], several studies indicate low user acceptance of these systems, as people perceive a loss of control [16,17]. Only a few studies are known to the authors that address multi-user issues for lighting [18][19][20][21], most of which focus on personal interfaces in shared systems, aimed to satisfy individual rather than shared preferences. For example, a case study in [19] enables workers in open office spaces to adjust their own desk light brightness in an energy-saving effort, and [20] explores different controls for individual lighting conditions during meetings and in a shared workspace.…”

“…Only a few studies are known to the authors that address multi-user issues for lighting [18][19][20][21], most of which focus on personal interfaces in shared systems, aimed to satisfy individual rather than shared preferences. For example, a case study in [19] enables workers in open office spaces to adjust their own desk light brightness in an energy-saving effort, and [20] explores different controls for individual lighting conditions during meetings and in a shared workspace. While the literature shows potential for satisfying individual lighting preferences, shared control and preferences seem both promising and underexplored.…”

Spatial Control Framework for Interactive Lighting

“…Commercial systems commonly use buttons or touchscreens, while research prototypes have been built to enable different modalities, such as gesture input [1], or combination of buttons, speech and gestures [17], to control a collection of different devices, with lighting being just one of the features. Personal mobile devices have also been applied to such tasks, which can provide both personalized and shared control of lighting [10]. At the same time, concepts where individuals can control large number of public lighting have been created (e.g., [21]).…”

Building application stack (BAS)

“…These applications have the potential to drastically improve building energy use, occupant comfort, reliability and maintenance (e.g. [10,12,17]). …”