Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the thermal environment and thermal comfort of elderly occupants living in elder care facilities and to compare the quality of sleep, in all four seasons, of these elderly occupants. A total of 16 healthy participants with a mean age of 80 ± 5 years (range, 70–87 years) were recruited in two elderly facilities, of which, 13 participated in all four measurements. The sleep parameter was measured by a wrist actigraph which the participants were requested to wear and analyzed with commercial software using the Cole–Kripke algorithm, to assign scores for sleeping and waking patterns. Both ambient temperature (Ta) and relative humidity (Rh) levels were found to be lower in the winter and higher in the summer. The Ta in the summer and Rh in the winter were not within the scope of the Japanese Standard for Maintenance of Sanitation in Buildings, as the central HVAC and air conditioners were turned off due to the absence of facility managers. More than 50% of the elderly occupants used fans and increased airflow by opening windows during the summer nights as an adaptive thermal approach. The slope of the relationship between prevailing mean outdoor temperature and indoor Ta determined in this study was similar to the adaptive model and the regression line lies over the upper limits of the adaptive model. No significant difference was found in the sleep parameter among the four seasons; however, a sex difference was found in the sleep latency and length of waking period during the sleep. The sleep parameters such as sleep efficiency indexes were significantly better for elderly women than men. The adaptive approach is not enough to improve the sleep efficiency of sleeping elderly people even within the acceptable temperature range based on the thermal comfort, especially for elderly men.
Highlights
People spend about one-third of their lives sleeping [1]
The most extreme values of both indoor Ta and relative humidity (Rh) were obtained in the summer and winter seasons; highest values of both Ta and Rh were measured in summer, and lowest values in the winter
The Ta and Rh did not change as much during the lights-out period from 21:00 to 6:00 because the central air conditioners were switched off
Summary
People spend about one-third of their lives sleeping [1]. Complaints related to difficulty in initiating and maintaining sleep increase with age [2,3,4]. The sleep quality of older people is found to be influenced by the surrounding environment and the total sleep time is found to be shorter due to higher temperature in the summer than in other seasons due to longer wakefulness [8,9]. This finding is attributed to the fact that older people were unable to not control their surrounding environment during the period of nocturnal sleep in the summer season because they lived independently and sustained themselves in detached old houses in suburban areas. Not much is known about the thermal environments present around the occupants of these elderly facilities
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