Office workers’ health during the pandemic lockdown in the Netherlands

The worldwide spread of the Coronavirus disease 2019 forced governments to enact different measures to mitigate the infections. Employers and workers had to adjust by shifting a substantial number of jobs to a “work from home” configuration (WFH). On average, people used to spend around 90% of their time indoors, however, this number may have...

Preferences for Indoor Environmental and Social Comfort of Outpatient Staff during the COVID-19 Pandemic, an Explanatory Study

While the pressure on hospital workers keeps growing, they are generally more dissatisfied with their comfort than other occupants in hospitals or offices. To better understand the comfort of outpatient workers in hospitals, clusters for preferences and perceptions of the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and social comfort were identified in a...

Ten questions concerning well-being in the built environment

Well-being in the built environment is a topic that features frequently in building standards and certification schemes, in scholarly articles and in the general press. However, despite this surge in attention, there are still many questions on how to effectively design, measure, and nurture well-being in the built environment. Bringing together...

Profiling outpatient staff based on their self-reported comfort and preferences of indoor environmental quality and social comfort in six hospitals

Comfort and health of outpatient staff is important due to the growing demand of healthcare and its crucial influence on society. Previous studies have mostly focused on the perception of comfort and indicated a large prevalence of building-related symptoms and dissatisfaction with comfort of staff in hospital buildings. Unfortunately,...

A review of comfort, health, and energy use: Understanding daily energy use and wellbeing for the development of a new approach to study comfort

There is a need for reducing dwellings’ energy consumption while maintaining a comfortable and healthy indoor environment. This review was performed to provide a steppingstone for identifying new methods for studying everyday home energy use and comfort. First, an overview of comfort is given as seen from different disciplines, depicting the...