AT-78-07A-3 -- Future Research Needs Concerning the Human Response to Indoor Environments ✓ Most Recent

It is a primary task for the HVAC-engineer to design systems which can maintain comfortable and healthy indoor environments for human beings. HVAC-engineers have therefore shown a great interest in research work aimed at studying man's response to his environment. This interest has for instance been demonstrated by ASHRAE's financial support to this kind of research for more than fifty years.

In spite of an extensive research effort, especially during the last decade, our knowledge on this subject is still quite limited and insufficient for many practical applications. This is due, among other things, to the special nature of this kind of research. In purely technical experiments it is normally sufficient to study one physical object. But because of the inter-individual differences it is necessary in human studies to include a large number of subjects in order to obtain a fair estimate of the distribution of the reactions among the population. Furthermore, in comfort studies, it is essential to obtain subjective ratings of the environment~ but to obtain reproducible results it will often be necessary to collect numerous responses from each subject. These conditions make this type of investigation lengthy and expensive, and this may explain why many. problems of primary interest to the HVAC-engineer have so far been insufficiently investigated and demand our efforts in the future.

In the present paper, attention will be drawn to a number of problems which need to be investigated: No attempt will be made to present the "state of the art". Reviews in refs. (1) and (2) deal with the effect of the thermal environment on man's comfort and productivity, and the effect of the composition of indoor air is reviewed in ref. (3).