What if temperatures on thermostats were not automated or set based on ambient but also body temperatures?
You may own or have come across this cool piece of technology called the Nest Learning Thermostat. Nest is probably the most beautiful thermostat in the market with technology that makes energy cost savings simple and a true effort toward a greener Earth.
What spurred the idea of the body thermostat was my experience being in a household with a Nest Learning Thermostat where parts of the house were warm and other parts cold. It got me to thinking how the thermostat is sensing temperature of the house? I understand it has sensors built into the unit. But how do those sensors receive temperature information from parts of the house the sensors cannot detect?
What if there was a way to detect body temperatures of folks in the house? Maybe it's a band that goes around your wrist that communicates your body temp back to the thermostat, or built into current wearables, or even a body temp sensing device that you place your finger on. The thermostat receives location information (occupied rooms), body temperatures of all occupants of the room, and then starts self-adjusting the temperature to bring the ambient and body temperatures to a pre-determined or self-taught level (AI).
This could be neat in many ways
Temperature of rooms un-occupied are of secondary importance. Unoccupied rooms are set at a level that isn't utilizing too much energy to heat or cool.
The learning thermostat learns overtime that the occupants spend X amount of hours in these rooms in the evening and then transition to this room for the night. It starts pre-adjusting room temperatures based on that information and location information. It's not just pre-adjusting an entire house temperature but more granular.
It adds to the already existing neat things Nest currently does like detecting when the house is occupied and not occupied and pre-adjusting based on the information.
And maybe, just maybe, we save more energy.
Happy Earth Day!