Illuminating Adaptive Comfort: Dynamic Lighting for the Active Occupant

This paper makes the assertion that established concepts from thermal comfort research might be used to develop an adaptive comfort model for lighting. By gathering data from a live office environment, we demonstrate the necessity of dynamically-adapted lighting levels in order to achieve both comfort and energy savings. We detail the background and the experimental setup that is used to extract the light levels at which the occupant switches his lights on. We show how individual occupancy information can be estimated from passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors, making fixed, global set points unnecessary.  Finally, we demonstrate the successful implementation of the control system.