CRI:II-New: The Living Link Lab: Infrastructure for Enhancing Occupant Experience and Building Operations

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Recent studies have demonstrated the great potential of smart building applications to optimize building efficiency and occupant comfort. However, these applications are often building-centric and there are limited formal characterizations of the interactions between occupants and built environments. This research infrastructure creates a new sensing testbed called the "Living Link-Lab" that transforms the University of Virginia (UVA) Cyber-Physical Systems laboratory (approximately 17,000 square feet) into a testbed for human-building interaction data collection and experimentation. With occupant-based wearables, interactive mobile robots, and comprehensive environmental sensors, this research infrastructure captures several dimensions of variability in human-building interactions, enabling new occupant-focused building control techniques. These techniques are prototyped on the testbed and then translated to other buildings to enhance occupant experience. The research infrastructure will enable long-term in-situ studies of occupant behavior, cognition, and interactions in a large collaborative environment, and it will support researchers from various backgrounds (e.g., engineering, psychology, architecture, and medicine) in exploring the human-building technology frontier. This unique sensing testbed provides a complete, real-time information about environmental changes, occupant behavior, and energy consumption. The project enables research on novel techniques for (i) enhancing occupant experience, (ii) energy monitoring, (iii) robotic mobile sensing, (iv) privacy-preserving sensing, (v) optimized Internet of Things (IoT) networks and sensors, and (vi) human-autonomy collaboration. The testbed also generates a comprehensive dataset that enables researchers from a range of backgrounds to collaborate on novel topics. The application-driven outcomes encourage students to pursue a computing research career path by demonstrating the real-world impact potential of the research. Additionally, the testbed enhances education on smart office spaces and leads to new courses being designed that leverage the physical testbeds and resulting data streams.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.