Currents iOS App

Sep 2022 - May 2023

SwiftSwiftUIFigma

As part of my project in Cornell University Sustainable Design, I designed and developed an app to control and optimize Cornell's HVAC systems based on room occupancy. Essentially, the app connects to an occupant's Google or Outlook calendar and will control the room's heating or cooling system according to whether they are in their room or not. We envision this being used mainly for single-occupancy rooms, such as professors' offices.

You are probably wondering a few things, such as how the app can control the HVAC systems and what happens if the occupant does not follow their calendar.

I'll address the first point. Interestingly, much of Cornell's HVAC systems are already controlled by "smart" connected systems from AutomatedLogic. We are simply tapping into AutomatedLogic's API to control these equipment through an app. It's actually really cool!

For the second point, the goal of this project is to eliminate as much hardware as possible, which is why we don't consider motion sensors. To account for edge cases, the app has a manual override feature in case occupants don't leave or arrive earlier than expected. However, we understand that this isn't enough, so there is a team working to develop a ML model to predict and respond to these edge cases. It will continuously learn from user behavior as well. We also designed a few questions for users to answer before use, such as whether they typically attend online meetings in or out of their office.