scholarly journals Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity

Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 660
Author(s):  
Francesco Salamone ◽  
Benedetta Barozzi ◽  
Alice Bellazzi ◽  
Lorenzo Belussi ◽  
Ludovico Danza ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Work Productivity ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Visual Comfort ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Relevant Variable ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Working From Home

Italians were the first European citizens to experience the lockdown due to Sars-Cov-2 in March 2020. Most employees were forced to work from home. People suddenly had to share common living spaces with family members for longer periods of time and convert home spaces into workplaces. This inevitably had a subjective impact on the perception, satisfaction and preference of indoor environmental quality and work productivity. A web-based survey was designed and administered to Italian employees to determine how they perceived the indoor environmental quality of residential spaces when Working From Home (WFH) and to investigate the relationship between different aspects of users’ satisfaction. A total of 330 valid questionnaires were collected and analysed. The article reports the results of the analyses conducted using a descriptive approach and predictive models to quantify comfort in living spaces when WFH, focusing on respondents’ satisfaction. Most of them were satisfied with the indoor environmental conditions (89% as the sum of “very satisfied” and “satisfied” responses for thermal comfort, 74% for visual comfort, 68% for acoustic quality and 81% for indoor air quality), while the layout of the furniture negatively influenced the WFH experience: 45% of the participants expressed an unsatisfactory or neutral opinion. The results of the sentiment analysis confirmed this trend. Among the Indoor Environmental factors that affect productivity, visual comfort is the most relevant variable. As for the predictive approach using machine learning, the Support Vector Machine classifier performed best in predicting overall satisfaction.

scholarly journals A Review of Balcony Impacts on the Indoor Environmental Quality of Dwellings

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 6453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catarina Ribeiro ◽  
Nuno M. M. Ramos ◽  
Inês Flores-Colen
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Indoor Air ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Visual Comfort ◽  
Acoustic Comfort ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Balconies are an ancient architectural archetype that are being increasingly considered in multi-family buildings of high-density cities. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the impacts of balcony types on the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and energy consumption of dwellings. Of the reviewed studies, 69% were published during the last decade, making it evident that awareness of the positive impact of balcony spaces is continuously increasing. The literature review allowed us to identify three balcony spaces according to their morphology and their boundary system: open balcony (OB), glazed balcony (GB), and eliminate balcony (EB). It was concluded that these balcony types produce relevant impacts in four factors that contribute to the indoor environmental quality: thermal comfort, indoor air quality, visual comfort, and acoustic comfort. Practical design recommendations and constraints were provided according to distinct climatic conditions and building technologies. This review also explored the assessment methodologies used for the optimization of the balconies on the design process. The literature highlighted the lack of a comprehensive study about the impact of balconies in mild and Mediterranean climates, as well as the knowledge limitations concerning the balance between the impacts on IEQ factors.

scholarly journals Quality of life of women working from home in COVID-19 lockdown: a questionnaire survey

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 3947
Author(s):  
Suruthi Raju ◽  
Vijay Krishna Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Working From Home ◽  
The Family ◽  
Community Transmission

Background: Lockdown as a precaution is aimed to reduce the community transmission and to defeat the pandemic COVID-19. The pandemic lockdown has an impact on lifestyle strategies in work from home employees.Methods: A cross sectional, questionnaire study with observational sampling of size no. 110 was conducted through web based data collection (google form) across India.Results: Data shows lockdown impact on lifestyle strategies like physical health, psychological health, social relationship and environmental factors of working from home employees were found significant. Majority of participants (working from home women) showed better quality of life in lockdown.Conclusions: This web-based survey shows significant results to highlight that women can balance their life style strategies with daily routine in COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Lockdown situation made women more active, mobile and balance their official work along with the family setup. 67.3% respondents were married and working from home and 48% of participants maintaining their better quality of life since lockdown.

scholarly journals A field survey on the indoor environmental quality of the UK primary school classroom

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 492-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yufan Zhang ◽  
Peter Barrett ◽  
Fay Davies ◽  
Lucinda Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Field Survey ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
The Uk

ASSESSMENT OF INDOOR ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY AND OCCURRENCE OF SICK BUILDING SYNDROME IN SMALL OFFICES IN PENANG, MALAYSIA

2015 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ang Qiu Mei ◽  
Md Azree Othuman Mydin
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Sick Building Syndrome ◽  
Quality Measurement ◽  
Comfort Level ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Sick Building ◽  
The Difference

This study was done to investigate the relationship between indoor environmental quality and prevalence of Sick Building Syndrome in six small offices inPenangIsland. Indoor environmental quality measurement was conducted according to relevant standards. There are totally Sixty workers were selected to participate in an electronic questionnaire survey. Questionnaire was used to record the comfort level of respondents in the case studies and level of sick building syndrome faced by respondents. Through indoor environmental quality measurement, it is found that most of the offices facing the lighting and noise problem. The result from the questionnaire shows that in overall, the occupants satisfy with their working environment in term of indoor environmental quality although the result also shows the opinions of occupants on dissatisfaction on certain indoor environmental parameter according to case study. The study also found that most of the occupants feel drowsy and fatigue when they work within the offices. Besides, due to the difference of the indoor environmental quality of the buildings, the occupants are suffered from different symptoms of the sick building syndrome.

scholarly journals Assessing Indoor Environmental Quality of Educational Buildings Using BIM

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Al-Sulaihi ◽  
Khalid Al-Gahtani ◽  
Abdullah Alsugair ◽  
Ibrahim Tijani
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Educational Buildings

scholarly journals Indoor Environmental Quality Survey in Research Institute: A Floor-by-Floor Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 14067
Author(s):  
Jong-Won Lee ◽  
Deuk-Woo Kim ◽  
Seung-Eon Lee ◽  
Jae-Weon Jeong
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Distribution Systems ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Work Productivity ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
User Friendliness ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Survey System ◽  
Survey Approach ◽  
Working Efficiency

Comprehensively monitoring indoor environmental quality (IEQ) parameters and their dynamic relations is essential to ensure improved productivity and a healthy environment for building occupants. Although IEQ significantly influences working efficiency, studies addressing this aspect with researchers in institutes as the focal point are limited. Thus, this study employed drill-down analyses, such as floor-by-floor and building-by-building examinations and used an occupant IEQ survey approach to evaluate working conditions in research buildings. This study systematically and objectively assessed IEQ using the Korea building occupant survey system. The results indicate that acoustic qualities affect the work productivity and satisfaction of the building occupants. The floor-by-floor analysis is necessary to identify IEQ factors and the reasons for the satisfaction of occupants. Additionally, it is important to improve the user-friendliness of the system, implement frequent survey distribution systems, and empirically analyze data associations among building, spatial, and demographical characteristics.

Short-term Measurements of Indoor Environmental Quality in Selected Offices – Case Study

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludmila Meciarova ◽  
Silvia Vilcekova ◽  
Eva Kridlova Burdova ◽  
Ilija Zoran Apostoloski ◽  
Danica Kosicanova
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Indoor Air ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Indoor Climate ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
The One

Decent quality of indoor air is important for health and wellbeing of building users. We live, work and study in indoors of various types of buildings. Often people are exposed to pollutants at higher concentrations than these that occur out-doors. Continual investigation of indoor air quality is needed for ensuring comfort and healthy environment. Measuring and analysis of occurrence of physical, chemical and biological factors is the first step for suggestion of optimization measures. Inside school buildings there are often inadequate indoor climate conditions such as thermal comfort parame-ters or ventilation. The aim of this study was determination of indoor environmental quality in selected offices in the building of elementary school in Slovakia. The values of operative temperature were not within the optimum range of values for the warm period of the year in one of the monitored offices. The intensity of illumination was lower in the two offices. Low levels of particulate matters were measured except the one office where permissible value was exceeded by 7.6%.

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