Model Predictive Control of Shallow Drowsiness: Improving Productivity of Office Workers

This paper proposes a methodology of model predictive control for alleviating shallow drowsiness of office workers and thus improving their productivity. The methodology is based on dynamically scheduling setting values for air conditioning and lighting to minimize the drowsiness level of office workers on the basis of a prediction model that represents the relation between the future drowsiness level and a combination of indoor temperature and ambient illuminance. The prediction model can be identified by utilizing a state-of-the-art drowsiness estimation method. The proposed methodology was evaluated in a real routine task (performed by six subjects over five workdays), and the evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed methodology improved the workers' processing speed by 8.3% without degrading their comfort.