Improving Residential Indoor Environmental Quality to Promote Aging in Place

This project uses surveys, interviews, and field measurements to characterize the indoor environmental conditions (including light, thermal, acoustic and air-quality) in seniors’ homes, to provide targets for improvement.

Status: Current

Research themes: Health and comfort

Research areas: Building design and retrofits for performance improvement; Wellbeing and comfort in the built environment; Cognitive and physical health in the built environment

Project Objective

Seniors are amongst the most vulnerable to poor indoor environmental conditions; this project focuses on improving the health and wellbeing of seniors so they can stay in their homes for longer.

Approach

This project uses a combination of surveys, interviews, and field testing to characterize the objective and perceived indoor environmental conditions in seniors’ homes. This project examines the domains of light, thermal, acoustic and air-quality with the aim of determining areas of weakness to develop targets for interventions in the future. Surveys, interviews and field testing will be conducted across Canada in a variety of residential building topologies to allow for extension of findings to the entire Canadian building stock.

Findings

This project will characterize the indoor environment of the Canadian building stock and Canadian senior population through representative sampling. This project will look for correlations between buildings features, measured indoor environmental quality parameters, occupant perception/comfort and health/wellbeing of occupants. The ultimate goal of this study is to determine the relationship between the built environment and the health/wellbeing of occupants. The findings of this study will be the foundation of developing built environment interventions which optimize the health and wellbeing of building occupants.