Physiological and sensory human response to IEQ indicators while asleep

Most of the available ventilation standards today are either descriptive or based on the perceived air quality theorem presented by (Fanger, 1988) eg. (CEN, 2004). In other research projects, the influence of the perceived air quality on office work performance (Wargocki et al., 2002), absenteeism or learning (Haverinen-Shaughnessy et al.) was investigated, establishing a correlation that can be used to trade-off the benefits of higher ventilation rates and the energy and investment cost related to it (Wargocki and Djukanovic, 2005). All of these experiments, however, relate to an active environment. (Seppanen and Fisk, 2004) provide a nice overview of the reported human response to changes in the ventilation rate. Most of the available residential ventilation standards are more or less prescriptive and not performance based eg. the Belgian residential ventilation standard (BIN, 1991). These standards are not suitable for system optimization due to the fact that they fix the sizing and layout of the systems to an absolute value, rather than the performance of the system. In order to develop a performance based ventilation standard for residential ventilation, understanding the human response to indoor environmental quality (IEQ) parameters will be of crucial importance to fix the performance indicators that are to be used to assess the performance of the system. However, about 70% of the time we spend at home is spent asleep (Basner et al., 2007, Glorieux, 2008). During this time, we are in a semi-conscious state and are not engaged in tasks of which the performance can be measured by output. Therefore, the performance indicators referred to above are only valid in a limited part of the net user time as far as residential ventilation is concerned. In this review paper, we try to summarize the available literature on the human physiological and sensory response to different IEQ parameters while asleep.