On September 28, 2017, Juan Pablo Sáenz presented the paper On the Design of an Energy and User Aware Study Room at the audience of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies, held in Torino, Italy.

Energetic sustainability on university campuses relies on the efficiency and smartness of the energy systems, as well as the behavior of its users. The aim of this work is to identify the requirements and propose the design of a Smart Study Room that, besides relying on users' awareness about their energy consumption, might also rely on their feedback about issues that could affect the optimal use of the study room resources.

To gain understanding of users’ behavior in an actual study room, we carried out a survey addressed to 61 university students with the purpose of identifying: (i) their usual behavior at the study room; (ii) their complaints about other students’ behaviors, infrastructure failures, and ambiance inadequacies (concerning temperature, lighting, air cleaning); (iii) the set of users’ behaviors that have a negative impact on energy consumption; and (iv) the information of the study room that they would find useful and interesting to visualize. Based on the results of the survey, a set of system requirements was defined and the design of the Smart Study Room was developed.

The proposed design of the Study Room was implemented and successfully deployed during a master thesis discussion at the Politecnico di Torino.

Here are the presentation slides, and the paper can be accessed here.