Exploring Ambient Air Quality Notifications for Smart Rooms

Abstract

Many regular meeting participants know the atmosphere of a meeting in a closed room when the air becomes stifling and uncomfortable. With increased concentration of carbon dioxide (CO 2), the cognitive performance of participants can also suffer as a result. Therefore, it makes sense to retrofit such meeting rooms with smarthome technology to improve the air quality. However, existing meeting rooms often do not have built-in ventilation systems. Hence, smart technology can be used to measure air quality and communicate that by ambient notifications such as ambient lighting. Actively ventilating a room is then left to the participants of a meeting. This paper reports on a user study demonstrating that the kind of unobtrusive notification from an ambient air quality display has a significant influence on response times of perceiving the information while being concentrated on the course of the meeting. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile computing; • Applied computing → Consumer health.

Understanding the Experiences of Remote Workers: Opportunities for Ambient Workspaces at Home

“…The importance of air quality for workplace wellbeing is also highlighted in the growing attention it has recently received in the HCI community, enhancing the importance of our early findings. Relevant work (Snow et al, 2016;Dang et al, 2020;Kim and Li, 2020;Zhong et al, 2020) addresses eco-feedback -including mobile and wearable visualizations, and ambient light notifications-and collaborative and predictive approaches to regulate air quality in office spaces (Zhong et al, 2020). However, the many elements of air quality experience in the workspace remain unaddressed by current research.…”

“…There are many aspects of air quality experience and management unaddressed by current research on the workplace (Snow et al, 2016;Dang et al, 2020;Kim and Li, 2020;Zhong et al, 2020). The problem of poor indoor air quality is often difficult to solve as air can be more polluted outside, and opening a window can mean increasing noise or decreasing heating.…”

“…Alavi et al (2017) addressed the multidimensional issue of comfort in the workplace through Comfortbox -a sensing physical display of environmental data, engaging the office space occupants in gaining awareness on their embodied comfort. Equally, air quality has been the focus of recent HCI and Human-AI Interaction research (Snow et al, 2016;Dang et al, 2020;Kim and Li, 2020;Zhong et al, 2020). Hilo (Zhong et al, 2020), a predictive system for CO2 mediated by wearable feedback, notifies the occupants of an office space to open the windows when indoor quality reaches a critical point, given the outdoor pollution is low.…”

“…The work of Kim and Li (2020) addresses ambient light as air quality feedback and its perceivability as eco feedback. Dang et al (2020) explore different forms of ambient air quality notifications for smart rooms, addressing user experiences and expectations of indoor air quality visualizations.…”