Suboptimal restraint use, particularly the incorrect use of restraints, is a significant and widespread problem among child vehicle occupants, and increases the risk of injury. Previous research has identified comfort as a potential factor influencing suboptimal restraint use. Both the real comfort experienced by the child and the parent’s perception of the child’s comfort are reported to influ...

Building on findings related to physiological and psychological motivations of food preference, this research develops a framework to examine preferences toward comfort foods. Study 1 used a North American survey of 411 people to determine favored comfort foods, and Study 2 quantified the preferences for these foods across gender and across age groups using a stratified sample of 1005 additiona...

We present a novel, personalised thermal comfort model and a heating agent using this model to reduce energy consumption with minimal comfort loss. At present, heating agents typically use simple models of user comfort when deciding on a set point temperature for the heating or cooling system. These models however generally fail to adapt to an individual user’s preferences, resulting in poor pe...

In rail vehicles, air springs are very important isolating component, which guarantee good ride comfort for passengers during their trip. In the most new rail–vehicle models, developed by researchers, the thermo–dynamical effects of air springs are ignored and secondary suspension is modeled by simple springs and dampers. As the performance of suspension components have significant effects on r...

Comfort on automobile seats is lived daily by thousands of drivers. Epistemologically, comfort can be understood under the theory of complexity, since it emerges from a chain of interrelationships between man and several elements of the system. This interaction process can engender extreme comfort associated to the feeling of pleasure and wellbeing or, on the other hand, lead to discomfort, nor...

Despite the obvious importance of thermal comfort in the design of indoor environment, it has not been effectively integrated with design decision support tools. The reasons can be attributed in part to an absence of modular and flexible software architecture that facilitates dynamic data transfer between energy performance, lighting simulation, and thermal comfort modules. Research has shown t...

Experimentally, the effects of environmental conditions upon human capabilities have been studied most often through the imposition of a single stressor in isolation. Although it seems to be a common belief that thermal comfort can be influenced by concomitant stimulation of non-tactile sensorial modalities, few studies have succeeded in delineating non-tactile stimulations, which interact with...

Current existing thermal control systems are operated based on thermal comfort models generated by regression formulas averaging the thermal responses over data collected during extensive experiments involving panels of human subjects. These models may not be appropriate for an individual whose physiological characteristics happen to be located outside of the main stream from the experimental s...

A personalized thermal comfort prediction method is proposed for use in combination with smart controls for building automation. Occupant thermal comfort is traditionally measured and predicted by the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) metric, which is based on extensive field trials linking reported comfort levels with the various factors. However, PMV is a statistical measure applying to large populat...