The design of an indirect method for the human presence monitoring in the intelligent building

This article describes the design and verification of the indirect method of predicting the course of CO2 concentration (ppm) from the measured temperature variables Tindoor (degrees C) and the relative humidity rH(indoor) (%) and the temperature T-outdoor (degrees C) using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with the Bayesian Regulation Method (BRM) for monitoring the presence of people in the individual premises in the Intelligent Administrative Building (IAB) using the PI System SW Tool (PI-Plant Information enterprise information system). The CA (Correlation Analysis), the MSE (Root Mean Squared Error) and the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) criteria were used to verify and classify the results obtained. Within the proposed method, the LMS adaptive filter algorithm was used to remove the noise of the resulting predicted course. In order to verify the method, two long-term experiments were performed, specifically from February 1 to February 28, 2015, from June 1 to June 28, 2015 and from February 8 to February 14, 2015. For the best results of the trained ANN BRM within the prediction of CO2, the correlation coefficient R for the proposed method was up to 92%. The verification of the proposed method confirmed the possibility to use the presence of people of the monitored IAB premises for monitoring. The designed indirect method of CO2 prediction has potential for reducing the investment and operating costs of the IAB in relation to the reduction of the number of implemented sensors in the IAB within the process of management of operational and technical functions in the IAB. The article also describes the design and implementation of the FEIVISUAL visualization application for mobile devices, which monitors the technological processes in the IAB. This application is optimized for Android devices and is platform independent. The application requires implementation of an application server that communicates with the data server and the application developed. The data of the application developed is obtained from the data storage of the PI System via a PI Web REST API (Application Programming Integration) client.Web of Science8art. no. 2

State-of-the-art on research and applications of machine learning in the building life cycle

Fueled by big data, powerful and affordable computing resources, and advanced algorithms, machine learning has been explored and applied to buildings research for the past decades and has demonstrated its potential to enhance building performance. This study systematically surveyed how machine learning has been applied at different stages of building life cycle. By conducting a literature search on the Web of Knowledge platform, we found 9579 papers in this field and selected 153 papers for an in-depth review. The number of published papers is increasing year by year, with a focus on building design, operation, and control. However, no study was found using machine learning in building commissioning. There are successful pilot studies on fault detection and diagnosis of HVAC equipment and systems, load prediction, energy baseline estimate, load shape clustering, occupancy prediction, and learning occupant behaviors and energy use patterns. None of the existing studies were adopted broadly by the building industry, due to common challenges including (1) lack of large scale labeled data to train and validate the model, (2) lack of model transferability, which limits a model trained with one data-rich building to be used in another building with limited data, (3) lack of strong justification of costs and benefits of deploying machine learning, and (4) the performance might not be reliable and robust for the stated goals, as the method might work for some buildings but could not be generalized to others. Findings from the study can inform future machine learning research to improve occupant comfort, energy efficiency, demand flexibility, and resilience of buildings, as well as to inspire young researchers in the field to explore multidisciplinary approaches that integrate building science, computing science, data science, and social science

Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance

One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff, patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.Comment: Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC

Viewfinder: final activity report

The VIEW-FINDER project (2006-2009) is an 'Advanced Robotics' project that seeks to apply a semi-autonomous robotic system to inspect ground safety in the event of a fire. Its primary aim is to gather data (visual and chemical) in order to assist rescue personnel. A base station combines the gathered information with information retrieved from off-site sources. The project addresses key issues related to map building and reconstruction, interfacing local command information with external sources, human-robot interfaces and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The VIEW-FINDER system is a semi-autonomous; the individual robot-sensors operate autonomously within the limits of the task assigned to them, that is, they will autonomously navigate through and inspect an area. Human operators monitor their operations and send high level task requests as well as low level commands through the interface to any nodes in the entire system. The human interface has to ensure the human supervisor and human interveners are provided a reduced but good and relevant overview of the ground and the robots and human rescue workers therein