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This study aims to evaluate the effects of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on the indoor and outdoor air quality in Kuwait due to vehicular traffic.

About 700 VOCs samples were collected from randomly selected residences within Kuwait. For simplicity, the study was divided into three areas: area A between the first and third ring roads, area B between the third and fifth ring roads and area C between the fifth and sixth ring roads. Hazardous Air Pollutants on Site (HAPSITE), a portable Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS), was used to gather air samples inside and outside of the residences selected in the study area for a period of three months during 2008.

Median indoor air quality levels in the study area were similar to the outdoor levels. Indoor/outdoor ratios varied from 0.5 to 8 for most compounds, suggesting that the indoor air quality was less than the outdoor air quality. It was found that none of the indoor VOC concentrations measured exceeded the upper limits of the indoor air quality set by the Kuwait Environmental Protection Agency (KEPA), with the exception of only one residence where the benzene concentration was observed to be in excess of 17 per cent of the KEPA limit. Moreover, the indoor air quality for the study areas was found to be in accordance with level 1 set by KEPA, indicative of very good air quality.

This is the first study conducted in Kuwait to collect VOCs samples and to explore the air quality inside and outside of residential buildings.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the indoor environmental quality among residential buildings in dense urban living environment, after the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which called for a review on the relationship between health issues and the authors' built facilities.

Environmental tests include thermal comfort, noise, daylight and air quality inside the residence of typical housing units were carried out. Based on inferences drawn from test results, the paper developed systematic conclusions.

It was observed that most of the occupants (over 70 per cent of 125 households) were tolerating the higher air temperature and dimmer daylight inside their residence, which was proven to fall behind Hong Kong Standard. On the contrary, people reflected that they were also trying to abate noise and dust concentration in their daily life.

Owing to the flat occupants' exclusive property rights in law, there were limited access to the residents' flats and only 32 occupants out of 125 allowed us to conduct the survey. Yet, the data set was justified.

The results provides practical guidance for the design of future housing to enhance health and comfort of occupants.

Originality of the findings is based on on‐site data collected in dense urban housing condition. Rating data were also collected from the occupants concerned about their habituation conditions in Hong Kong after the outbreak of SARS, which was a major crisis that called for fundamental review of the authors' built facilities.

A growing number of travelers seek well-being when traveling. As concerning about outdoor air pollution in tourism destinations escalates, little is known about indoor air pollution in hotel guestrooms. The purpose of the present study is to assess particulate matter (PM) pollution in US hotel guestrooms and to provide baseline indoor PM readings in occupied and unoccupied rooms.

A series of field tests and experiments monitoring PM levels were conducted in the guestrooms overnight – with and without occupants – using the sophisticated, industrial-grade PM-monitoring equipment.

The results revealed that PM levels were very low when rooms were unoccupied or when guests were asleep. However, unhealthy PM mass concentrations were observed in occupied rooms when guests engaged in physical activity such as showering and walking around or while room attendants cleaned rooms. Among the physical activities, room cleaning caused hazardous indoor PM pollution, reaching 1,665.9 µg/m³ of PM10 and 140.4 µg/m³ of PM2.5 although they tended to be brief.

Leveraging increasing guest demand in well-being is essential for sustainable business and further growth. Indoor air quality must be recognized as an important factor to be controlled for well-being and health of guests and employees. Major hotel brands should take it into consideration as they infuse well-being DNA into their products and culture.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical investigation of PM pollution both in occupied and unoccupied hotel guestrooms in the USA, which reveals unhealthy PM pollution associated with the routine human activities in occupied guestrooms.

Exposure to poor indoor air in refurbished buildings is a matter of health concern due to the growing concentrations of various contaminants as a result of building airtightness without amendment of ventilation, or the use of building materials such as glue, paint, thinner and varnishes. Recent studies have been conducted to measure indoor air pollutants and assess the health risks affecting the quality of life, productivity and well-being of human beings. However, limited review studies have been recently conducted to provide an overview of the state of knowledge. This study aims to conduct a scoping review of indoor air quality (IAQ) in the context of refurbished or energy-retrofitted buildings.

A systematic screening process based on the PRISMA protocol was followed to extract relevant articles. Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and PubMed were searched using customised search formulas. Among 276 potentially relevant records, 38 studies were included in the final review covering a period from 2015 to 2022.

Researchers mapped out the measured compounds in the selected studies and found that carbon dioxide (CO₂) (11%) and total volatile organic compounds (11%) were among the most commonly measured contaminants. Two trends of research were found including (1) the impact of ventilative properties on IAQ and (2) the impact of introducing building materials on IAQ.

The contribution of this study lies in summarising evidence on IAQ measurements in refurbished buildings, discussing recent advancements, revealing significant gaps and limitations, identifying the trends of research and drawing conclusions regarding future research directions on the topic.

This systematic review examined the emerging threat of indoor and outdoor pollutants to public health in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

Pollutants and pollution levels are becoming an increasing cause for concern within the LAC region, primarily because of the rapid increase in urbanization and the use of fossil fuels. The rise in indoor and outdoor air pollutants impacts public health, and there are limited regional studies on the impact of these pollutants and how they affect public health. A comprehensive literature search was conducted using Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, EBSCOhost, Web of Science and ScienceDirect databases. Significant search terms included “indoor air pollution,” “outdoor air pollution,” “pollution,” “Latin America,” “Central America,” “South America” and “Caribbean was used.” The systematic review utilized the Rayyan systematic software for uploading and sorting study references.

Database searches produced 1,674 results, of which, after using the inclusion–exclusion criteria and assessing for bias, 16 studies were included and used for the systematic review. These studies covered both indoor and outdoor pollution. Various indoor and outdoor air pollutants linked to low birth weight, asthma, cancer and DNA impairment were reported in this review. Even though only some intervention programs are available within the region to mitigate the harmful effects of pollution, these programs need to be robust and appropriately implemented, causing possible threats to public health. Significant gaps in the research were identified, especially in the Caribbean.

Limitations of the study include limited available research done within LAC, with most of the research quantifying pollutants rather than addressing their impacts. Additionally, most studies focus on air pollution but neglect water and land pollution’s effects on public health. For this reason, the 16 studies included limited robustness of the review.

Although available studies quantifying pollution threats in LAC were identified in this review, research on the adverse impacts of pollution, especially concerning public health, is limited. LAC countries should explore making cities more energy-efficient, compact and green while improving the transportation sector by utilizing clean power generation. In order to properly lessen the effects of pollution on public health, more research needs to be done and implemented programs that are working need to be strengthened and expanded.

Most people spend a great deal of their lives in an artificial environment, seeking refuge from a sometimes harsh and destructive outdoor climate. Clever architecture and engineering can make use of natural energy and forces to create a comfortable indoor climate using minimum non‐renewable resources.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive framework for the study of indoor air quality (IAQ) in hospitality premises. The goal is to identify the drivers of air pollution, both at the exogenous and endogenous level, to generate insights for facility managers.

The complexity of hospitality premises requires an integrated approach to properly investigate IAQ. The authors develop an overarching framework encompassing a monitoring method, based on real-time sensors, a technological standard and a set of statistical analyses for the assessment of both IAQ performance and drivers, based on correlation analyses, analysis of variance and multivariate regressions.

The findings suggest that the main drivers of IAQ differ depending on the area monitored: areas in contact with the outdoors or with high ventilation rates, such as halls, are affected by outdoor air quality more than guestrooms or fitness areas, where human activities are the main sources of contamination.

The results suggest that the integration of IAQ indicators into control dashboards would support management decisions, both in defining protocols to support resilience of the sector in a postpandemic world and in directing investments on the premises. This would also address guests’ pressing demands for a broader approach to cleanliness and safety and support their satisfaction and intention to return.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study developing a comprehensive framework to systematically address IAQ and its drivers, based on a standard and real-time monitoring. The framework has been applied across the longest period of monitoring for a hospitality premise thus far and over an entire hotel facility.

This paper aims to present the most influential factors on classroom indoor PM_2.5 (Particulate Matter < 2.5 µ), determining the level of PM_2.5 concentration in five pre-schools located in the most densely populated district of the Tehran metropolitan area (district 6) as a case study to consider the children's exposure to air pollutants and introducing a suitable model, for the first time, to predict PM_2.5 concentration changes, inside pre-schools.

Indoor and outdoor classes PM_2.5 concentrations were measured using two DUSTTRAK direct-reading instruments. Additional class status information was also recorded; concurrently, urban PM_2.5 concentrations and meteorological data were obtained from the fixed monitoring stations and Meteorological Organization. Then, the predicted concentrations of the indoor PM_2.5, from introduced multiple linear regression model via SPSS, compared with the nearest urban air pollution monitoring stations data.

The average outdoor PM_2.5 concentration (43 ± 0.32 µg m⁻³) was higher than the mean indoor (32 ± 0. 21 µg m⁻³), and both were significantly (p < 0.001) surpassing the 24-h EPA standard level. The indoor PM_2.5 concentrations had the highest level in the autumn (48.7 µg m⁻³) and significantly correlated with the outdoor PM_2.5 (r = 0.94, p < 0.001), the number of pupils, ambient temperature, wind speed, wind direction and open area of the doors and windows (p < 0.001). These parameters, as the main determinants, have led to present a 7-variable regression model, with R² = 0.705, which can predict PM_2.5 concentrations in the pre-school classes with more than 80% accuracy. It can be presumed that the penetration of outdoor PM_2.5 was the main source of indoor PM_2.5 concentrations.

This study faced several limitations, such as accessibility to classrooms, and limitations in technicians' numbers, leading to researchers monitoring indoor and outdoor PM concentrations in schools once a week. Additionally, regarding logistical limitations to using monitoring instruments in pre-schools simultaneously, correction factors by running the instruments were applied to obtain comparable measurements.

The author hereby declares that this submission is his own work and to the best of its knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person.

At the beginning of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a digitalized construction environments surfaced in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in the form of a modern delivery system called demand controlled ventilation (DCV). Demand controlled ventilation has the potential to solve the building ventilation's biggest problem of managing indoor air quality (IAQ) for controlling COVID-19 transmission in indoor environments. However, the improper evaluation and information management of infection prevention on dense crowd activities such as measurement errors and volatile organic compound (VOC) generation failure rates, is fragmented so the aim of this research is to integrate this and explore potentials with machine learning algorithms (MLAs).

The method used is a thorough systematic literature review (SLR) approach. The results of this research consist of a detailed description of the DCV system and digitalized construction process of its IAQ elements.

The discussion revealed that DCV has a potential for being further integrated by perceiving it as a MLAs and hereby enabling the management of IAQ level from the perspective of health risk function mechanism (i.e. VOC and CO₂) for maintaining a comfortable thermal environment and save energy of public and private buildings (PPBs). The appropriate MLA can also be selected in different occupancy patterns for seasonal variations, ventilation behavior, building type and locations, as well as current indoor air pollution control strategies. Furthermore, the conceptual framework showed that MLA application such as algorithm design/Model Predictive Control (MPC) integration can alleviate the high spread limitation of COVID-19 in the indoor environment.

Finally, the research concludes that a large unexploited potential within integration and innovation is recognized in the DCV system and MLAs which can be improved to optimize level of IAQ from the perspective of health throughout the building sector DCV process systems. The requirements of CO₂ based DCV along with VOC concentrations monitoring practice should be taken into consideration through further research and experience with adaption and implementation from the ventilation control initial stage of the DCV process.