Exploring the feasibility of mobile robots for post-occupancy evaluations

Post-occupancy evaluation collects occupant feedback and assesses indoor environmental quality to enhance the indoor environment. Traditional paper- and web-based surveys have several limitations, such as discontinuous, labor-intensive, and suffer from low response rates and participation bias. Meanwhile, state-of-the-art IEQ monitoring methods have limited spatial resolution, cumbersome calibration and maintenance, and high costs. In this paper, a mobile sensing ComfyBot was developed to actively solicit occupants' feedback while continuously monitoring IEQ parameters, including temperature, humidity, sound, illuminance, and (Formula presented.). A one-week field experiment was conducted in three student offices, ranging from 480 to 1,620 (Formula presented.), on a university campus. 34 participants voluntarily participated, and the results showed that the ComfyBot: (1) significantly increased the response rate of the POE surveys from 0.13 to 0.90; (2) was perceived as useful with a mean usability score of 72.8 out of 100. Among the 23 valid exit-survey responses, 78% preferred responding to the ComfyBot survey and 87% expressed willingness to interact with the ComfyBot again; and (3) captured more representative sentiments of participants than email surveys. Therefore, the study contributes and concludes that ComfyBot enables facility managers to collect occupant feedback, measure continuous IEQ parameters and detect anomalies to create a healthy and sustainable indoor environment.