What is it about?
We spend roughly 90% of our time indoors, meaning our buildings have a massive impact on both our health and the planet's climate. While "smart buildings" use technology to save energy, they sometimes ignore what the actual people inside need to feel comfortable. This paper explores the growing field of "Human-Building Interaction" (HBI)—how humans and buildings communicate using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors like smart thermostats, air quality monitors, and occupancy detectors. We reviewed how these sensors help buildings achieve two primary goals: saving energy and keeping people healthy with comfortable temperatures and clean air. We also examined how people control these systems—from phone apps to voice assistants—and the real-world challenges of making these systems reliable, private, and easy to use for everyone.
Featured Image
Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash
Why is it important?
As the threat of climate change accelerates, reducing building energy consumption is critical. However, current energy-saving methods often sacrifice occupant comfort or health, such as reducing fresh air ventilation to save heating costs. This work is highly timely because it bridges the gap between strict sustainability standards (like LEED and BREEAM) and the actual human experience. What makes this review unique is its focus on the interaction—moving beyond simply listing hardware to analyze how occupants use diverse interfaces to collaborate with their environments. Furthermore, it highlights critical blind spots in current research, such as the "hardware-software gap" in uncalibrated cheap sensors, demographic inequalities in standard thermal comfort models, and the lack of exploration into indoor water and transport sustainability. This provides a clear roadmap for engineers, architects, and policymakers to design smart buildings that are highly efficient, fully interoperable, and truly occupant-centric.
Perspectives
Writing this review revealed a fascinating but concerning disconnect in the smart building industry: we often assume that installing more sensors automatically makes a building "smart" or "green". However, diving into the literature made it clear that technology alone is insufficient if it alienates the occupants. For example, the realization that standard, globally accepted temperature models often leave female and elderly occupants uncomfortably cold in the summer was a stark reminder that designing for the "average" user does not mean designing for inclusion. My personal perspective is that the next generation of smart buildings must prioritize equity, accessibility, and human agency. We should not force people to adapt to black-box algorithms; rather, we need intuitive, multimodal interfaces that empower every individual to seamlessly shape their environment without feeling overwhelmed. True sustainability can only be achieved when people trust their buildings and feel actively engaged in their operation.
Mr. Suhas Prakash Devmane
Cardiff University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Utilizing Internet of Things in Human-Building Interaction to Support Sustainable Built Environments, ACM Computing Surveys, February 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3796536.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
