Abstract
Today, the effects of the indoor environment on occupants’ health and comfort represent a very important topic and requires a holistic approach in which the four main environmental factors (thermal comfort, air quality, acoustics, and lighting) should be simultaneously assessed. The present paper shows the results of a literature survey that aimed to collect the indicators for the evaluation of occupants’ health and comfort in indoor environmental quality evaluations. A broad number of papers that propose the indicators of a specific environmental factor is available in the scientific literature, but a review that collects the indicators of all four factors is lacking. In this review paper, the difference between indicators for the evaluation of risk for human health and for comfort evaluation is clarified. For each environmental factor, the risk for human health indicators are proposed with the relative threshold values, and the human comfort indicators are grouped into categories according to the number of parameters included, or the specific field of application for which they are proposed. Furthermore, the differences between human health and comfort indicators are highlighted.
Highlights
Nowadays, the awareness of the relevance of obtaining buildings with high performance to reduce both energy consumption and the impact on the environment (CO2 emissions into the atmosphere), have been collectively reached
The literature research started by separately search in the scientific databases “ScienceDirect”, “MDPI”, “Web of Science” (WOS) and “Google Scholar” the terms related to health and comfort evaluation of the four main environmental factors: “thermal comfort”, “thermal stress” “indoor air quality”, “indoor air pollution”, acoustics comfort”, “noise exposure”, “visual comfort”, “visual fatigue”
The human body responds to environmental variables in a dynamic interaction that can lead to death if the response is inappropriate, or if energy levels are beyond survivable limits, and it determines the strain on the body as it uses its resources to maintain an optimum state
Summary
The awareness of the relevance of obtaining buildings with high performance to reduce both energy consumption and the impact on the environment (CO2 emissions into the atmosphere), have been collectively reached. The built environment can be interpreted as a physical and social environment that must guarantee the environmental conditions to promote wellbeing, health, productivity, and interactions between people To this aim, at the European level, new building certification assets have already been developed; they include the assessment of energy performance, and the levels of comfort and well-being that can be achieved within the indoor environment [3,4,5,6]. Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) assessments, with particular reference to work environments, should combine the evaluation of all the possible factors that can have negative effects on health with the evaluation of the perceived levels of comfort [10]. As regards the assessment of comfort, the indicators are grouped into categories according to the number of parameters included, or the specific field of application for which they were proposed
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