Sensing by Proxy in Buildings with Agglomerative Clustering of Indoor Temperature Movements

As the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) develops, buildings are equipped with increasingly heterogeneous sensors to track building status as well as occupant activities. As users become more and more concerned with their privacy in buildings, explicit sensing techniques can lead to uncomfortableness and resistance from occupants. In this paper, we adapt a sensing by proxy paradigm that monitors building status and coarse occupant activities through agglomerative clustering of indoor temperature movements. Through extensive experimentation on 86 classrooms, offices and labs in a five-story school building in western Europe, we prove that indoor temperature movements can be leveraged to infer latent information about indoor environments, especially about rooms' relative physical locations and rough type of occupant activities. Our results evidence a cost-effective approach to extending commercial building control systems and gaining extra relevant intelligence from such systems.