Design and application of occupant voting systems for collecting occupant feedback on indoor environmental quality of buildings - A review

Tools leveraging information and communication technologies for collecting occupant feedback on indoor environmental quality in buildings are receiving increasing attention. The obvious application examples of these tools, denoted as occupant voting system (OVS), include data-driven comfort models for control of buildings. Even though their application range is much wider, related literature is somewhat scattered across different building-related research fields. The aim of the present paper was to gather and review previous scientific publications about tools characterised as OVS across various applications, ranging from data-driven comfort models for control of building systems to occupant surveys for in-field research studies, as to characterise identified OVS. The present study applied Thematic Synthesis on fifty publications. This resulted in an explicit definition and framework to characterise OVS based on their application, design and used incentives motivating occupant interaction. The review revealed that OVS was applied to obtain thermal comfort models for temperature control, to support facility managers with building operation and to help occupants share their comfort votes with co-occupants. Moreover, OVS was used by researchers as a tool for collecting long-term in-field survey responses. The review also identified challenges related to occupants' interaction with OVS, occupants' interpretation of used assessment scales, occurrence of extreme votes, inconsistency in voting pattern and privacy concerns in relation to data collection and presentation of occupant votes.