Open Collections

Lam, Man In

University of British Columbia

The COVID-19 pandemic started in 2019 have brought increasing public attentions to the built environment quality and human health. The negative impacts of infectious agents in buildings have long been recognized by health professionals before the occurrence of the recent global pandemic, and extensive efforts have been made to remove “harmful” substances from the buildings that we spent 90% of the time in today. However, current buildings are far from being truly healthful for the occupants evidenced by growing risks of hospital associated infections, seasonal epidemic outbreaks, and recent global pandemic. The root of the problem is to reduce the pathogens inside the buildings yet indoor microbiome is highly dynamic which interacts with numerous building factors simultaneously thus brings tremendous challenges to cleaning and disinfections. In recent years, scientists and researchers have starting to realize that improving building design can provide extensive benefits to occupant’s health meanwhile reduce the building’s environmental impact. Indoor daylight, an important healthy building foundation, plays a crucial role in affecting the occupant’s mental health and well-beings, albeit its effect on indoor microbiome has rarely been explored. The goal of this study is to explore the interactions between indoor daylight and indoor microbiome and provide important insights for the future healthy building design. To achieve this, a literature review was first provided in chapter 2, and two experiments were conducted: the first experiment (chapter 3) was performed in a controlled laboratory environment, where bacterial and fungal pathogens were exposed to different indoor daylight conditions on different surface materials. The second experiment was performed in a hospital (chapter 4), where indoor environment and patient samples were collected in patient rooms with electrochromic windows (N=5), and with regular windows and blinds (N=5) over the five-day of patient stay. Results of this study showed that indoor daylight can be a promising intervention to reduce pathogen growth and minimize risks of infections in all built environments. Green building design such as the use of electrochromic window which brings more daylight into the buildings can be a critical step to maintain a healthy indoor microbiome and achieve a truly healthy building.

Text

2024-04-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84391

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/