2017 ASHRAE Annual Conference

The buildings in which we live, work, and play have a tremendous impact on our health, wellbeing, and productivity. This presents a unique opportunity to utilize the design, construction, and operation of buildings to promote and improve human health. Numerous green building programs exist that focus on environmental impact and sustainability within the building design and construction industries, but there remains limited guidance on factors that impact the health and wellbeing of occupants. This is a serious gap, as occupants are the reason buildings are constructed, so their needs must be considered.

Relative humidity has a significant impact on indoor buildings and occupants. Specifically relative humidity impacts occupant health and comfort, as well as building energy usage and preservation. The ASHRAE Handbooks reference humidity over 300 times. Recent changes to the building envelope, HVAC equipment, and occupant requirements will impact ASHRAE humidity recommendations. There are many different HVAC product solutions that can be applied based on ASHRAE’s guidance. This seminar highlights some of the significant interactions concerning humidity levels, as well as outlining significant humidity recommendations and gaps.

Light, whether it originates from natural or electrical sources, is a formable stimulus for regulating circadian, hormonal, and behavioral systems. Over illumination may cause headaches, fatigue, medically defined stress, anxiety and decreases in sexual function. Under illumination may lead to chronic diseases such as breast & prostate cancers, obesity and early-onset diabetes. When considering standards for building design, it is therefore important to balance the desirable and undesirable impacts of light or darkness. Achieving this balance begins with an understanding of how photoreceptors in the eye function and why different visual and non-visual wavelengths of light cause different responses.

Indoor environments greatly impact human comfort, health, and productivity. To investigate and quantify this impact, a highly controllable and reconfigurable laboratory, the Well Living Lab, was designed and built to simulate real-world office and residential spaces. This presentation provides an overview of the experimental capabilities of the Well Living Lab, which include an integrated and scalable building control system, environmental and biometric sensing, and experiment management system. An overview of on-going and planned human-subject research is also provided.