Sumario: | Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) has become a prominent topic in the building sector. This has led to a broadening of the scope of design guidance - which until recently had primarily focused on energy demand reduction - towards the inclusion of human-centred parameters such as comfort, health and wellbeing. The National Engineering Policy Centre's 2022 report Infection resilient environments: Time for a major upgrade shows how important a topic this has now become. Major building rating schemes now include IEQ in their assessments, either as standalone certifications or within broader remits. However, as the focus shifts from the building fabric to human inhabitants, it becomes ever more important not to rely solely on models and simulations. To deliver effective results, assessments of IEQ need to be performed during the operational stage and for a prolonged period of time - ideally over weeks or months - or, even better, they should become an integrated and permanent feature of a building system.
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