Review of thermal comfort infused with the latest big data and modeling progresses in public health

Abstract Thermal environment is important for both occupants’ comfort and health. Previously, the impacts of thermal environment were explored in the areas of thermal comfort and public health separately. This paper aims to bridge both disciplines by examining the correlation between comfort temperature and Minimum Mortality Temperature (MMT), which is a key index quantifying the association of health and weather temperature, through literature review and data-driven approach. It was found that the MMT data obtained from the public health area are generally in good agreement with the thermal neutral temperatures from the comfort perspective. The MMT data range from 17.2 °C to 30 °C, which are similar to the thermal neutral temperatures ranging from 19.5 °C to 30 °C based on the global field tests. Moreover, the MMT data demonstrate the potential to capture some complex distribution patterns of the field comfort data. The introduction of the health-temperature data could assist the intensive field experiments and modeling efforts and complement the thermal comfort dataset, which suffers from the problems of limited sample size. Some discrepancies between the two datasets were identified as well. The contextual factors other than the climate factor which may cause such discrepancies, such as socio-economics, population densities, etc. should be analyzed to enable the potential application of the health-temperature data and modeling to thermal comfort and health studies.

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