Integrated indoor environmental quality assessment methods for occupant comfort and productivity: From data acquisition to visualization

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of buildings can have a strong influence on occupants’ productivity and health. Post occupancy evaluation (POE) and associated processes are often the first step in assessing IEQ, which includes visual quality, thermal quality, air quality, acoustic quality, etc. In general, these field measurements are time-consuming and labourintensive. To present measured results, one efficacious approach is to overlay field data with building floor plans or building system drawings. This approach enables the visualisation of the built environment performance in a more apprehensible fashion. The current practice of mapping measured data with existing building components is manual, and there is a lack of flexibility of accommodating time-series building performance measurements. In this paper, we propose an integrated process to support IEQ assessments in an automated fashion, which enables field data synchronization and mapping for integrated building performance visualisation. For demonstration, we conducted a lighting quality measurement on two selected subjects, one unoccupied (core and shell) LEED gold certified building and an occupied office building in Los Angeles, California, USA. The outcomes are presented to show how measured performance data can be updated with the associated building elements for integrated visualisation. Advantages and limitations of this approach for improving the workflow of IEQ are also discussed.