Gauging the impact of personal lifestyle, indoor environmental quality and work-related factors on occupant productivity when working from home

PurposePersonal lifestyle, work environments and work-related factors can significantly affect occupant productivity. Although many studies examine the affecting factors of occupant productivity in offices, explorations for the home-based work environment, which is designed mainly for living purposes, are still scarce. Moreover, current pandemic has made work from home a new normal for workers around the world. Therefore, it is important to identify key causal factors of occupant productivity when working from home.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed descriptive analysis and regression analysis method to explore the relationship among personal lifestyle, indoor environmental quality and work-related factors toward occupant productivity. A questionnaire including a comprehensive list of key measures was designed and 189 valid responses were collected from more than 13,000 participants.FindingsResults show that a healthy lifestyle, the perceived satisfaction of visual and acoustic environment, communication, interest in work, workload, flexible schedule and privacy positively affect occupant productivity when working from home, while coffee consumption, outside views and windows have negative effect.Originality/valueOpportunities to enhance occupants' home-based work productivity include developing a healthy lifestyle by taking advantage of flexible schedule, equipping a working room at home with advanced and intelligent environment control systems, and improving communication, workload and schedule by changing the policy of companies.

Thermal Comfort of the Environment with Internet of Things, Big Data and Machine Learning

This research proposes to evaluate the level of thermal comfort of the environment in real time using Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Machine Learning (ML) techniques for collecting, storage, processing and analysis of the concerned information. The search for thermal comfort provides the best living and health conditions for human beings. The environment, as one of its functions, must present the climatic conditions necessary for human thermal comfort. In the research, wireless sensors are used to monitor the Heat Index, the Thermal Discomfort Index and the Temperature and Humidity Index of remote indoor environments to intelligently monitor the level of comfort and alert possible hazards to the people present. Machine learning algorithms are also used to analyse the history of stored data and formulate models capable of making predictions of the parameters of the environment to determine preventive actions or optimize the environment control for reducing energy consumption.

COVID-19 Experience Transforming the Protective Environment of Office Buildings and Spaces

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected human life in every possible way and, alongside this, the need has been felt that office buildings and workplaces must have protective and preventive layers against COVID-19 transmission so that a smooth transition from ‘work from home’ to ‘work from office’ is possible. However, a comprehensive understanding of how the protective environment can be built around office buildings and workspaces, based on the year-long experience of living with COVID-19, is largely absent. The present study reviews international agency regulation, country regulation, updated journal articles, etc., to critically understand lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate the expected changes in sustainability requirements of office buildings and workplaces. The built environment, control environment, and regulatory environment around office buildings and workplaces have been put under test on safety grounds during the pandemic. Workers switched over to safely work from home. Our findings bring out the changes required to be affected in the three broad environmental dimensions to limit their vulnerability status experienced during the pandemic. Office building designs should be fundamentally oriented to provide certain safety protective measures to the workers, such as touch-free technologies, open working layouts, and workplace flexibilities to diminish the probability of getting infected. Engineering and administrative control mechanisms should work in a complementary way to eliminate the risk of disease spread. Country regulation, agency regulations, and operational guidelines need to bring behavioral changes required to protect workers from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Boosting HSE Management More Efficiently and Sustainably: How Innovation Can Bring Change in Traditional HSE Mindsets?

As a part of laboratory Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) management system, the working environment control is applied to eliminate various occupational hazards for workers. This control is a continuous effort in our petroleum R&D laboratory as the working environment management system. As an element in the management system, workplace inspection has been taken into the regular HSE activity. Even traditional and well established, the workplace inspection has been continuously improved and optimized from various aspect of inspection design, inspection members selection, check list, and feedback. To make the continual improving practices more practical and effective, workplace features such as laboratory specific environment and ad-hoc research programs have been incorporated into the inspection design. All findings are summarized immediately after every inspection, and subsequently which types of risks hidden in the findings and necessary corrective actions are discussed. All of them: findings, risks, and corrective measures should be swiftly shared with all employees in the workplace. A check list format has been optimized from both aspects of easier recording by inspectors and correctly feedback to responsible personnel to take right counter measures. The paper analyses a large data of workplace inspection results in recent 10 years. The analysis reveals that hazardous sources are decreasing in recent years because of maturity of HSE culture in our laboratory. A combined cycle of inspection activity and data analysis would be useful for understanding the current status of working environment control and considering further updating plan. This paper discusses a practical example of laboratory HSE management system from both of detailed and high levels. Furthermore, a potential is discussed for a future workplace inspection using artificial intelligence and deep learning. The enterprising discussion contributes employee's traditional mindset fresh.

Remote sensing based on time variance control in configurable area partitioning

In this paper a sensor data fusion approach for characteristics field monitoring, based on time variance control model, is proposed. Distributed sensing and remote processing are the basic features of the employed architecture. In fact, in order to obtain meaningful information about the temporal and spatial variations, which characterize the field levels of some characteristics (electromagnetic, air pollution, seismic, etc), a distributed network of wireless and mobile smart-sensors has been designed.Starting from the partitioned configuration of a monitored geographic areas, this model allows to take into account the different levels of degradation over time in the sensors' performances associated with the different geographic partitions, progressively increasing the severity of the control. To this end, through the introduction of a reliability curve, a revised traditional control chart for variables is proposed.The proposed approach, further constituting an element of the scientific debate, aims to be a useful operational tool for professionals and managers employed in the environment control.

The Role of Electrochemistry and Mineralogy in the Geotechnical Behavior of Salinized Soils

The Atterberg limits are essential information and the first step in soil classification for geotechnical purposes. Established laboratoryprocedures use distilled water in the plasticity and liquid limits determination. However, saline solutions frequently interact with soilsin the construction environment through fluid percolation processes. This work aims to understand the variation of the geotechnicalbehavior of two standard materials with different mineralogical compositions (kaolinitic and smectitic) when affected by NaCl ionicsolutions in different concentrations. The purpose is to simulate different soils in environments with the presence of saline solutions.This paper reports an experimental program in which a kaolinite-rich and a smectite-rich material received NaCl solutions in threedifferent concentrations (0.6 %, 3.5 %, and 15.0 %) and had their Atterberg limits determined under these conditions. Additionally,non-contaminated samples of both materials have had their limits measured using distilled water. Physical characterization testsincluded hygroscopic moisture, grain size distribution, grain density, plastic limit (PL), and liquid limit (LL). These data allowed thedetermination of the Skempton activity index (AI), plasticity index (PI), consistency index (CI), classification of soils in the UnifiedSoil Classification System (USCS), and in the Highway Research Board (HRB) with the group index (GI). Mineralogy was determinedby X-ray diffraction and physical chemistry by measuring pH in H2O and KCl, determining the ΔpH, the point of zero-charge (PZC),and the surface electrical potential (Ψo). The results show that the pH values rise with increasing salinity, while ΔpH, PZC, Ψo, LL,AI, PI, GI decrease with increasing salinity. The PL decreases with the increase in salinity for smectite and increases for kaolinite. TheUSCS and HRB demonstrate that the materials start to behave as fewer plastic materials with increased salinity. It is concluded that thevariations in the physicochemical parameters of the environment control and modify the geotechnical behavior of the fine-grained soils.

In Situ Stress Measurements on Thin Film Au Positive Electrode during the First Discharge of Li-O2 Batteries

The formation and growth of the Li2O2 discharge product impacts the reversibility of the oxygen evolution and reduction reactions in Li-O2 batteries which may lead to a shorter cycle life. A clear understanding of the surface reactions and the growth mechanism of Li2O2 requires probing dynamic changes on the surface of the positive electrodes in situ during the discharge of a Li-O2 battery. To investigate this, we establish an experimental system by adopting a multi-beam optical sensor (MOS) and developing a custom-made battery cell. First, the accuracy and reliability of the system was demonstrated by analyzing the stress accumulation on the Au negative electrode during Li plating/stripping, and the results were consistent with an earlier single-beam scanning deflectometry report. Then, the Li-O2 battery was discharged in LiNO3 in diglyme electrolyte by applying either linear sweep voltammetry or by applying constant current under an O2 environment. Control experiments in Argon-saturated electrolytes indicate surface stress generation due to charge-induced stress. The stress generation on Au positive electrode is attributed to the formation of Li2O2 reaction products on the Au surface and charge-induced stress.

The family of Annonaceae: the important role in forest ecosystems and human being life

Forest, as a natural resource, plays an important role for all living organisms which are living inside or outside the forest. Various plant species are found living in the forest, including the Annonaceae family which consists of 109 genera and 2440 species that are also playing an important role in the environment and human life. The purpose of this study was to reveal the importance of the Annonaceae family for the life of human beings and the life of organisms in the forest. Using the exploration method by analyzing exploration data, including secondary data, this study was conducted. The results showed that members of the Annonaceae family are those essentially controlling the balance of forest ecosystems, environment control for organisms, and provide food for creatures in the forest. Others such as ecological, hydrological, and climatological functions are provided by the members. Besides, several members are timber sources for human interest as well as a raw material of traditional medicine, cosmetics, and perfume. Another usage of the members is used in traditional ceremonies. Moreover, Annaceous acetogenin compound found in Annonaceae can be used as an antitumor and also as a pesticide, which will lead to a promise in the future.