Is anyone home? A critical review of occupant-centric smart HVAC controls implementations in residential buildings

Smart home technologies have long been envisioned as a mainstay in future residential buildings; however, residential smart home technologies have fallen short of expectations. Generally referred to by the literature as occupant-centric controls (OCC), a subset of these technologies focus on sensing and/or managing systems based on occupant feedback, preferences, or perceptions. While past reviews have documented OCC applications in commercial and industrial building types, residential applications have been rarely distinguished as their own unique application of OCC. This article critically reviews the state-of-the art research in both simulation and field-experiments - neither of which fully align with existing commercial smart home OCC technologies. Study demographics, location, building systems, implementation objectives, and experimental methods are compared and critiqued to understand where research, through simulation and field-experiments, needs to be focused. Key identified shortcomings include: low diversity of studied building systems, overly simplified simulation scenarios, short durations of field testing, inappropriate choices of occupant types, and non-standardized implementation performance metrics and test cases. Furthermore, innovation is hampered by limited standardization in technology communication protocols, the inability to integrate systems from different manufacturers, missing technology transfer protocols to translate researched implementations into commercial applications, and a lack of vision and planning for future policies and technologies that enable effective and comprehensive smart home implementations.

Automated summary

Smart home technologies have not met expectations in residential settings, with research primarily focused on commercial and industrial buildings rather than residential applications. Limitations include lack of standardization, simplistic research methods, and other shortcomings that hinder innovation in effective and comprehensive smart home implementations.