Ashrant Aryal

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University

Fatigue is one of the factors leading to reduction in productivity, poor quality of work and increased risk of accidents in construction. Existing established methods of assessing fatigue include surveys and questionnaires, which are cumbersome to implement at construction sites. This study presents a novel approach for real time monitoring of phys...

The diversity in occupants’ thermal comfort preferences is usually overlooked in the operations of centralized-HVAC buildings and room temperatures are maintained within a narrow temperature range. In this study, we first created total of 400 comfort profiles for four major climate zones and for two seasons (winter and summer), using the RP884 data...

People spend most of their day in buildings, and a large portion of the energy in buildings is used to control the indoor environment for creating acceptable conditions for occupants. However, the majority of the building systems are controlled based on a “one size fits all” scheme which cannot account for individual occupant preferences. This lead...

Recent advancements in Internet of Things and Machine Learning have opened the possibility of deploying sensors at a large scale to monitor the environment and to model and predict thermal comfort at an individual level. There has been a growing interest to use physiological information obtained from wearable devices or thermal imaging to improve i...

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems account for 43% of building energy consumption, yet only 38% of commercial building occupants are satisfied with the thermal environment. The primary reasons for low occupant satisfaction are that HVAC operations do not integrate occupant comfort requirements nor control the thermal environm...

Dairy cattle lameness represents one of the common concerns in intensive and commercial dairy farms. Lameness is characterized by gait-related behavioral changes in cows and multiple approaches are being utilized to associate these changes with lameness conditions including data from accelerometers, and other precision technologies. The objective w...

Fatigue is a common problem in the construction industry due to the labor-intensive, repetitive, and physically demanding nature of the activities. Most construction projects are carried out in the summer, when the temperature typically ranges from 90 o F to 110 o F, exposing workers to the danger of heightened fatigue and heat exhaustion. Although...

Human-Building Interaction (HBI) is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. This paper provides core definitions, research dimensions, and an overall vision for the future of HBI as developed through consensus among 25 interdisciplinary...

Phase change materials (PCMs) have been utilized to improve the thermal properties of cementitious composites by using their latent heat capacity. Applying them to building components can reduce their heating and cooling loads through energy absorption during the phase change period. The shape-stabilized method using porous lightweight aggregates c...

This paper seeks to address ten questions that explore the burgeoning field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), an interdisciplinary field that represents the next frontier in convergent research and innovation to enable the dynamic interplay of human and building interactional intelligence. The field of HBI builds on several existing efforts in h...

Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) are energy-efficient devices that create a microenvironment around occupants and can be controlled individually to improve personal comfort. Most studies related to PCS either focus on improving occupants’ thermal satisfaction or evaluate the energy-saving potential of PCS devices but do not consider the energy and co...

Sedentary activity and static postures are associated with work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) and worker discomfort. Ergonomic evaluation for office workers is commonly performed by experts using tools such as the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA), but there is limited evidence suggesting sustained compliance with expert’s recommendati...

Centralized HVAC systems are usually unable to cater to individual requirements when multiple occupants are present in the same zone. Personalized Comfort Systems (PCS) such as local fans and heaters, heated/cooled chairs, local ventilation systems, have shown to be useful for maintaining comfortable thermal conditions by creating a microclimate ar...

Despite the large share of energy consumption, current HVAC systems in buildings fail to meet their primary purpose of maintaining comfortable indoor conditions. Current "one size fits all" approach to control the thermal conditions in an environment lead to a high degree of occupant dissatisfaction. Advancements in Internet of Things and Machine L...

In addition to its influence on lighting energy consumption, lighting systems also impact the cooling and heating energy consumption, which originates from the use of artificial lighting and/or blinds. In this paper, we focus on understanding participants’ lighting choices and the influence of user’s lighting choices on energy consumption. We condu...

Even though HVAC systems consume around 40% of total building energy, they often fail to provide satisfactory thermal conditions to occupants in commercial buildings. Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS) such as local fans and heaters have the potential to control the local environment around the occupant to improve occupant satisfacti...

Feedback systems are useful to increase occupant awareness and disrupt their wasteful behaviors. The study presented in this paper explores the opportunity for feedback system designers to use information visualization to guide occupants to a desired option without reducing the occupant's control over the environment. In contrast to previous studie...

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental conditions remains low in buildings that provide little to no control over the environment. Poor environmental conditions lead to lower productivity and can have negative impacts on health and wellbeing. Personalizing the environment based on user preferences could not only improve health and well-bei...

Post-earthquake operations, such as search and rescue and damage assessment, require efficient and effective surveying technologies to rapidly capture the "as-damaged" state of buildings. Recent research has shown early feasibility of methods for compilation of as-damaged building information models (BIM) from as-damaged point cloud data and "as-bu...