Energy portal for HVAC applications via smart phones

Abstract

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) are seeing more interest and research in recent years. However, such systems require wireless sensor networks to be set up to facilitate the positioning computations of the desired object.

New Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are also being developed and improved, now with technology for localized cooling in progress.

This project explores the possibility of improving the IPS by ridding the extensive hardware components for the wireless sensor networks required and instead using smart phone devices, desktop computers, and laptop computers to act as a smart sensor. Additionally, the result would then be collected and visualized as a thermal map to provide a tool for an automated localized cooling in the future.

The smart phone device would use the Media Access Control addresses and the Received Signal Strength Indicator values from nearby existing wireless routers as parameters for positioning; no wireless sensor networks components are needed. The parameters are then passed through a machine learning technique called Extreme Learning Machines, which would output the position of the device. The result would be displayed on an energy portal web page, which visualizes an approximate thermal profile of the room. HVAC system administrators can then use this result to manually adjust the localized cooling or post the data to the system for automated adjustment. Various alternatives are also explored in the process.