Social Temperature Sensing

Subjective well-being in an office space has been an important topic of discussion. While traditional companies focus on measuring the well-being of an employee by factors like one's salary and social standing, research has shown that factors like the office environment, work delegation and office ethics have more effect on an employee's well-being. Thus, this thesis focuses on the concept of facet well-being which deals with the comfort of an employee due to the change in physical environment. A literature study was done where it was found that thermal comfort has the most impact on the well-being of a person in the context of facet well-being. Also, various factors affecting thermal comfort was researched and narrowed down to age, gender, food, clothing and exercise. The aim of this thesis is to answer the main research question i.e., "How can a self-reporting mobile phone application be used to get a measure of perceived temperature?". To answer this research question, a self-reporting hybrid mobile phone application was developed using Apache Cordova and Bluemix, where the business logic of this mobile phone application involved asking questions based on the aforementioned influencing factors. An experiment was then conducted at IBM to get a measure of perceived temperature of their employees using this mobile phone application and verify it's relationship with the influencing factors. In addition, temperature sensors fitted on Arduino boards were used to measure indoor temperature. A novelty in this thesis is the development of a self-reporting mobile phone application which may be the first of it's kind solution to get a measure of thermal comfort of a person in a computer science domain. Also, the requirement of this thesis was that the experiment should be conducted in an uncontrolled environment which would give its results more credibility as it explores thermal comfort in a practical scenario. From the results obtained after the experiment, it was seen that a self-reporting mobile phone application can be used to get the information about the factors that influence perceived temperature of an employee and in the future it can be used to improve his/her well-being.