Development of an Indoor Environmental Quality Assessment Tool for the Rating of Offices in Real Working Conditions

Pursuing occupants' health and well-being in building management: Definition of new metrics based on indoor air parameters

The spread of COVID-19 has affected the lives of millions of people. Pandemic has made people more sensitive to health issues. In particular, the growing concern for the virus spread in confined spaces has promoted the necessity to improve indoor air quality. Literature is stressing how buildings must be designed and operated pursuing occupants' health and well-being, with a particular attention for indoor air parameters. This poses the challenge of monitoring and assessing these aspects through proper metrics. In this paper the approach towards a multi-step assessment procedure embedding in buildings assessment health and well-being related variables and indicators is elaborated. They are intended to inform a building manager of the potential influence of air conditions on human health and well-being. Moreover, a set of monetary metrics (i.e., impacts) is proposed to translate energy and indoor air related building performances into euros, putting the basis for a comprehensive economic evaluation. The application of the set of proposed metrics to an Italian hotel (i.e., Italian pilot of H2020 MOBISTYLE project), enabled to map some indoor air conditions causing health concerns, and to identify clusters of guests with best and worst indoor air conditions, to be targeted by new management strategies. Despite case study specific limitations, the application exemplified how the methodology can expand the traditional energy-based performance assessment for building management towards indoor air domain and the related economic impacts, with implication on results in terms of overall economic performance of the building from both a private and public perspective.

Variables That Affect Thermal Comfort and Its Measuring Instruments: A Systematic Review

Thermal comfort can impact the general behavior of the occupants, and considering that humans currently perform 90% of their daily work indoors, it is necessary to improve the accuracy of thermal comfort assessments, and a correct selection of variables could make this possible. However, no review integrates all the variables that could influence thermal comfort evaluation, which relates them to their respective capture devices. For this reason, this research identifies all the variables that influence the thermal comfort of a building, together with the measurement tools for these variables, evaluating the relevance of each one in the research carried out to date. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was carried out by analyzing a set of articles selected under certain defined inclusion/exclusion criteria. In this way, it became evident that the most used variables to measure thermal comfort are the same as those used by the predicted mean vote (PMV) model; however, research focused on the behavior of the occupants has focused on new variables that seek to respond to individual differences in human thermal perception.

Assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality in Budget Hotels Using Text-Mining Method: Case Study of Top Five Brands in China

Guests’ evaluation of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is important for identifying environment quality problems in hotels and improving service quality. This paper aims to identify IEQ problems in budget hotels in China and improve them. Specifically, 2.06 million online reviews of budget hotels were used to assess IEQ issues in China’s budget hotels in four areas: acoustic environment, luminous environment, indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal environment. The influences of the season, region and type of customers on the IEQ evaluation were also explored, and the main causes of IEQ problems were also identified. The research results show that the IEQ complaint rates of budget hotels are relatively high. In particular, complaints about the acoustic environment are more common. Differences in seasons and climate zones have significant effects on complaints about the acoustic environment, thermal environment and IAQ. Different types of customers have different concerns about hotel IEQ, among which solo travelers and traveling couples have higher requirements for IEQ. The occurrence of IEQ problems significantly reduces a hotel’s online rating, with IAQ and the thermal environment having the greatest impacts, but the causal factors that trigger IEQ problems are relatively concentrated. The findings of this paper can provide a reference for assessing IEQ problems in hotel buildings and guide hotel managers to adopt targeted IEQ improvement programs to promote sustainable development in the hotel industry.