Validation of human thermo-physiology models for personalized predictions of thermal responses

Current thermal comfort models used in practice do not consider physiological and psychological differences. Human thermo-physiology models (HTPM) are useful tools to assess human thermal comfort at local and overall levels in the human body. All published HTPM models claim a high level of agreement with experimental data; however, in most cases, the comparison was made with data from third-party experimentation. This paper presents an independent detailed evaluation of two sophisticated human thermo-physiology models, JOS3 and ThermoSEM, considering individual parameters (gender, height, weight, etc.) as input. Furthermore, both models are similar in heat transfer calculation but differ in thermoregulation control. For validation, we used data from our experimental study with male and female subjects sitting relaxed and standing sorting under different environmental conditions (22-28°C) in a climatic chamber. The measured core temperature and the skin temperature at 14 locations were used to evaluate the predicted values. The paper highlights the capabilities and limitations of HTPMs and, furthermore, discusses the application of HTPMs in the field of individualized thermal comfort. The results show that HTPMs are valuable tools for predicting individual local thermal response but in order to reach a better accuracy models needs more refinement on local thermal characteristics assumptions.