Interactive effects of indoor environmental factors on work performance

Abstract

Among a variety of environmental factors, operative temperature, relative humidity and ventilation rate are generally considered to be factors that significantly affect work performance, and the interactions among these three factors were quantitatively studied in this paper. Eighteen participants were recruited to complete the neurobehavioral ability tests in different environments by central composite design, and their performance was analysed by regression fitting and multi-factor coupling analysis. By defining the interval coefficient β, the interaction effects between the factors were calculated quantitatively. The results showed that: for the performance of perception and expression tasks, there was an antagonistic effect between operative temperature and relative humidity (β = 0.50 ∼ 0.82), between operative temperature and ventilation rate (β = −0.29 to −0.38), and among the three factors (β = 0.38–0.67). There was a synergy effect between relative humidity and ventilation rate (β = 1.71–2.28). For the performance of reasoning tasks, the interaction effect among the three factors and their combinations is antagonistic effect (β = 0.67–0.83). Practitioner summary: We proposed a method to calculate the quantitative relation of multi-factor interactions. In recent ergonomics studies, more and more factors have been included. This method can well describe the synergistic or antagonistic effect of the changes of other factors on the target factors.