Addressing Objective and Subjective Indicators of Comfort in Educational Environments

The environmental conditions that impact comfort in educational settings can affect the quality of teaching and the students' performance. Thus, reaching sustainable learning environments goes through addressing which conditions affect this comfort and how students perceive them. For this reason, this work aims to contribute to a better understanding of the socio- environmental factors that drive comfort in educational environ-ments and evaluating their objective and subjective perspectives of them. In this regard, a proof-of-concept of an intelligent system for comfort measurement in educational environments is presented. This multi-modal system consists of two parts: (i) an environmental condition monitoring device that tracks comfort-related conditions by means of sensors (i.e., noise level, temperature, humidity, air quality and luminosity) and (ii) a smart audiovisual system designed to monitor and analyze complementary comfort-related parameters (e.g., emotions or audio quality). Through this system, an experimental evaluation was conducted to collect several inputs from 140 students in two different faculties and obtain both subjective information (collecting answers from a survey) and objective data through the described environmental sensors in class. The conclusions derived from the obtained quantitative and qualitative data aim to con-tribute to the scientific knowledge and the enabling technologies required to define a new way to model, quantify, monitor, and holistically optimize comfort in physical environments for better educational performance and campus sustainability.