Human-building interaction towards a sustainable built environment: A review

Human Building Interaction (HBI), a recently introduced emerging area, can be used for various purposes, including the development of better designs, constructions, and operations, as well as the support of building managers and occupants in meeting their goals. The expanding community of HBI researchers seeks to investigate the future of HBI research and design for an interactive built environment. Building managers and owners strive for energy-efficient, sustainable, and more livable buildings to improve and become 'smart.' Diverse buildings and urban spaces are individually designed and outfitted with various systems, components, and accessories. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), these devices form a network of internet-connected 'things' that generate massive amounts of data. We can collect vast volumes of data in unprecedented numbers, providing critical insights that allow buildings to care for us by learning from acquired data and adjusting to our requirements. This paper contributes to HBI by surveying various efforts to interact with buildings using IoT sensors and interconnected things to gain useful insights. Buildings, in our perspective, have distinct personalities and obligations to achieve their objectives. So, we are trying to incorporate them into reality. Considering a building to be a bio-inspired living architecture, we compare human anatomy to building anatomy to understand better the functions and operations that buildings can perform in their built environment. Thinking from this outlook allows us to investigate how sensors can help us achieve such building sustainability standards and what operations they perform to create an interactive built environment. This review paper aims to investigate the role of sensors in particular and to what extent they can provide various useful insights to building occupants and users to meet sustainability standards. We examine the most recent work on how people engage with and interact with buildings via various interfaces to achieve sustainability goals. Finally, some domain-specific challenges that limit human engagement and interactions with the built environment are discussed