Indoor Environmental Quality, Building Health, and Comfort  

Education Type: 
On-Demand
Duration: 
1.5 Hours
Level: 
Intermediate
Prerequisites: 

None

FEMP IACET: 
0.2 CEU
Sponsored by: 

DOE Federal Energy Management Program - FEMP

This 2019 Energy Exchange recorded session provides an overview and discusses practical applications of research relating the indoor environment to health. It discusses the application of advanced indoor environmental sensing technologies to the U.S. General Services Administration's programs for building renovation, design, construction, and maintenance. It also covers an economic framework for quantifying the financial benefits of building retrofits on employee productivity, absenteeism, and turnover and describes a cost-benefit analysis to help holistic decision making without requiring intensive time and resource inputs. Finally, this training discusses how buildings can add to mission resiliency by protecting occupant health from external pollutants stemming from extreme events such as wildfire smoke.

Instructors

Brian Gilligan, Sustainable Design Program Expert, U.S. General Services Administration

Nora Wang, Staff Engineer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Rengie Chan, Research Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this training, attendees will be able to:

  • Current research on buildings and health by the federal government and others;
  • How to evaluate a building's ability to act as a defense against external pollutants from extreme events and how that contributes to overall mission resiliency;
  • How indoor environmental sensors can be used to take objective measures of indoor environmental quality and occupant health outcomes and how they can be used to assess a building's "health" performance using key performance indicators;
  • The relationship of common energy efficiency measures and healthy building strategies in indoor air quality, lighting, daylighting, and thermal comfort; and
  • How to evaluate the overall cost and benefits of building retrofits considering their impacts on occupants and energy consumption.
Federal Agencies and Facility Criteria: