Heating in human-HVAC interaction for smart homes: An interdisciplinary overview
Delong Korus-Du, Gunnar Stevens, Alexander Boden, Lenneke Kuijer, Apostolos K. Vavouris, Md Shajalal, Philip Engelbutzeder, Omid Veisi, et al.
cs.HC · cs.AI · cs.SI · eess.SY
Quick verdict
Scoping review of 541 studies unifying smart-home heating research; proposes interaction framework, four tensions; conceptual, lacks empirical validation.
Summary
This scoping review integrates 541 studies spanning architecture, engineering, informatics, physiology, psychology, sociology, and design into a unified account of how residents interact with residential heating in smart homes. Using a PRISMA-informed protocol, the authors searched Web of Science in four staged title-search rounds (13,261 broad records narrowed to 9,593, then 735 records, then 316 full texts, yielding 286 database-derived studies), then added 255 studies through backward citation searching seeded via Connected Papers. The synthesis proposes 'Human–HVAC Interaction' as an analytical lens organized around three interdependent areas: Situated Interaction Dynamics (control and feedback, both user- and system-initiated), Residents' Experience and Practices (thermal comfort as physiology, psychology, and household negotiation; energy management), and Heating in HVAC System Mechanics (thermal conditions and energy performance). The review identifies four interdisciplinary tensions — sensed versus lived conditions, personalization versus negotiation, efficiency versus health, and automation versus agency — as design constraints for healthy, affordable, sustainable heating. Main limitations: 47% of the corpus entered via backward citation searching, no formal quality appraisal of the primary studies is reported, and the framework is a conceptual synthesis without empirical validation.
Review complete
Assessment at a glance
4
risk flags identified
● high 0
● medium 2
● low 2
5 strengths · 5 weaknesses · 5 author questions
AI text signal = Binoculars zero-shot detector score over 20 sampled passages (Fast-DetectGPT co-reported) — absence does not prove human authorship, and a flag does not imply misconduct.
Levels reflect verification complexity — not a quality score. Evolve never rates your paper.
Key claims under review
- Research on residential heating interaction is fragmented across disciplines and can be integrated into a three-area Human–HVAC Interaction framework built on 541 studies.
- Heating interactions are organized by Situated Interaction Dynamics: control and feedback initiated by users (monitoring past/present performance, planning future operation) or by systems (sensor-driven automation and informing).
- Four interdisciplinary tensions — sensed versus lived conditions, personalization versus negotiation, efficiency versus health, and automation versus agency — must be balanced when designing heating for health, affordability, and sustainability.
- Physiological sensing is not yet reliable enough for stand-alone thermal-comfort control because single-point skin temperature, calibration limits, and wearing burden misrepresent whole-body state in non-uniform environments.
- Low recorded energy consumption can reflect harmful underheating rather than successful conservation, so consumption must be interpreted against indoor conditions and household resources.
Strengths
Transparent staged search pipeline
PRISMA-informed flow (§2.1, Fig. 2) with full counts at every gate — 13,261 broad records → 9,593 starting set → 735 → 316 full texts → 286 included + 255 snowballed = 541 — plus database-specific query adaptations and BibTeX exports deposited in supplementary materials, which is unusually auditable for an interdisciplinary scoping review.
Genuine cross-disciplinary integration
Sections 1.2–1.3 engage thermal-comfort modeling, occupant-centric control, HBI/HCI, Social Practice Theory, and Sustainable HCI on their own terms, and explicitly position the new term as a connector rather than a replacement for HBI, occupant-centric control, or adaptive thermal comfort — a rare discipline-respectful framing.
Concrete, failure-mode-grounded tensions
Honest treatment of evidence ambiguity
Self-aware methodological limits
Weaknesses
No quality appraisal of primary studies
Nearly half the corpus from citation snowballing
WoS-centric identification
Framework value asserted, not demonstrated
Exclusion transparency gaps
Full Review Report
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Report preview
Preliminary Review: Heating in Human–HVAC Interaction for Smart Homes (Build. Environ. 305 (2026) 115220; arXiv 2609.23508)
The remaining sections cover Methodology Assessment, Statistical Evidence, Results & Reproducibility, Limitations & Risks, and Verdict & Recommendations.
- All 5 strengths & 5 weaknesses, analyzed in detail
- 4 risk flags with severity, section & reviewer questions
- Methods & statistical evidence assessment
- 5 questions a peer reviewer would ask
- Full six-dimension evaluation report & recommendations
One-time purchase · this paper only
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Frequently asked questions
What is Human–HVAC Interaction?
It is an interdisciplinary analytical lens proposed by this review to study how residents and residential heating systems mutually shape indoor thermal conditions and energy practices in smart homes. It connects, rather than replaces, existing concepts such as Human–Building Interaction, occupant-centric control, adaptive thermal comfort, and Social Practice Theory, organizing them into three areas: situated interaction dynamics (control and feedback, user- or system-initiated), residents' experiences and practices, and HVAC system mechanics.
How many studies did the review include and how were they found?
541 unique publications. A PRISMA-informed staged search of Web of Science narrowed 13,261 broad records to 9,593, then 735, then 316 full-text assessments; 286 studies remained after 30 exclusions. Backward citation searching seeded via Connected Papers added 255 more. Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library served as supplementary coverage checks. The search was completed May 22, 2026, covering English-language publications with no lower date limit.
What are the four tensions identified in the paper?
The review identifies four interdisciplinary tensions in smart-home heating: (1) sensed versus lived conditions — sensor data and comfort models diverge from bodily experience; (2) personalization versus negotiation — individualized preferences clash with multi-person household norms and empathy; (3) efficiency versus health — energy savings can conflict with healthy indoor temperatures, especially for energy-poor households; (4) automation versus agency — automated control can undermine residents' ability to understand and correct their systems.
Is the paper's framework empirically validated?
No. It is a conceptual synthesis (scoping review) of 541 studies. The framework organizes existing literature and highlights tensions and design considerations; no quantitative meta-analysis, effect-size pooling, or predictive validation is reported, and no formal quality appraisal of the primary studies is described in the paper text.
About this review
This is an AI-generated preliminary review by Evolve.Pub, produced from the openly available text of the paper. It is not peer review and does not represent the authors' views. The canonical record of the paper is at the publisher link above.
- Large portions of the extracted text were omitted (most of §2.2 data analysis, the full results chapters on interaction dynamics and system mechanics, discussion, conclusion, and study limitations); judgments about synthesis depth rely on the abstract, highlights, and surviving passages.
- Figures 1–3 (framework overview, PRISMA flow, field categorization) are referenced but not analyzable from the extracted text.
- Supplementary materials (search strings, BibTeX exports) are referenced but not present, so search reproducibility could not be checked directly.
- The arXiv metadata lists 8 authors while the journal byline in the text includes a ninth (Peter Tolmie); this review reflects the journal text.
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