scholarly journals Exploring Cross-Modal Influences on the Evaluation of Indoor-Environmental Conditions

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Berger ◽  
Ardeshir Mahdavi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Energy Performance Of Buildings ◽  
Parametric Studies ◽  
Term Basis ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Office Rooms

The comfort requirements of occupants influence indoor-environmental factors and energy performance of buildings. Occupants are typically exposed to a multitude of indoor-environmental factors, including a variety of different thermal, auditory, visual, and air quality conditions. However, the bulk of past research and derivative indoor-environmental codes and standards concerning the comfort of occupants address the multiple indoor-environmental stimuli in isolation. Starting from a brief review of past research on multi-perceptual indoor-environmental assessments of occupants, the present study pursues an experimental approach to explore the potential cross-modal effects on the evaluation of indoor-environmental thermal, visual, and acoustic aspects. In this context, a laboratory space including two adjacent identical mock-up office rooms was used to conduct multi-aspect parametric studies with human participants. Different thermal, visual, and auditory conditions were maintained in these two units. In the course of the present study, 296 participants were exposed, on a short-term basis, to different combinations of thermal, visual, and auditory conditions. The experiments were intended to explore if the evaluation of one aspect of the indoor environment could be influenced by differences in the values pertaining to the other aspects. The experimental results are presented and discussed, including their limitations.

scholarly journals Impact of environmental factors in predicting daily severity scores of atopic dermatitis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillem Hurault ◽  
Valentin Delorieux ◽  
Young-Min Kim ◽  
Kangmo Ahn ◽  
Hywel C. Williams ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Atopic Dermatitis ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Air Pollutants ◽  
Panel Study ◽  
Predictive Performance ◽  
Statistical Machine Learning ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Mixed Effect ◽  
Severity Scores ◽  
Term Basis

ABSTRACTBackgroundAtopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects 20% of children worldwide. Although environmental factors including weather and air pollutants have been shown to be associated with AD symptoms, the time-dependent nature of such a relationship has not been adequately investigated.ObjectiveThis paper aims to assess the short-term impact of weather and air pollutants on AD severity scores.MethodsUsing longitudinal data from a published panel study of 177 paediatric patients followed up for 17 months, we developed statistical machine learning models to predict daily AD severity scores for individual study participants. Exposures consisted of daily meteorological variables and concentrations of air pollutants and outcomes were daily recordings of scores for six AD signs. We developed a mixed effect autoregressive ordinal logistic regression model, validated it in a forward-chaining setting, and evaluated the effects of the environmental factors on the predictive performance.ResultsOur model outperformed benchmark models for daily prediction of the AD severity scores. The predictive performance of AD severity scores was not improved by the addition of measured environmental factors. Any potential short-term influence of environmental exposures on AD severity scores was outweighed by the underlying persistence of preceding scores.ConclusionsOur data does not offer enough evidence to support a claim that AD symptoms are associated with weather or air pollutants on a short-term basis. Inferences about the magnitude of the effect of environmental factors require consideration of the time-dependence of the AD severity scores.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document