A Smart Heating System for Energy Management using an Enhanced Kinetic User Interface

ABSTRACT Improving energy efficiency of buildings is becoming increasingly critical to reduce energy consumption and to solve the environmental crisis while ensuring thermal comfort. Heaters are among the appliances that consume a significant amount of energy. This paper introduces a way to optimize the energy consumption of heating systems by adjusting the room temperature and minimizing the heating periods while keeping the comfort of the occupants. The kinetic user interface combines motion awareness and activity recognition to regulate the temperature depending on the type of activity the user is carrying out. However, changing the temperature is a slow process. Starting to adjust the temperature exactly when the user starts an activity might be too late and might cause physical discomfort. Consequently, we propose an enhanced kinetic user interface that takes into account not only the user’s current activity but also the time the room needs to heat up or cool down.