Evaluating Indoor Environmental Quality of a Wellness Center Through Objective, Subjective and Architectural Criteria
This study analyzes the indoor environmental quality through objective measures and architectural assessments as well as users comfort evolutions at a wellness center in Ankara, Turkey. The topics they focused on regarding IEQ are acoustics, lighting, thermal and humidity measurements on indoor environments.
Before the article goes into their findings it explains some primary facts regarding lighting and acoustics. Vision is our primary sense through which we experience the world and light it what assist in people being able to do that. Another thing to consider is the energy consumption of lighting in the overall building design. It is wise to employ natural sunlight as part of a green building strategy because of sustainability but also the overall comfort of the building’s occupants. It is proven that offices with less sunlight can lead to depression and stress. When it comes to acoustics, many studies show that noise and temperature are the main components in determining the satisfaction of a building’s occupants. In office spaces lack of acoustic comfort can reduce productivity rates. Offices with better acoustics comfort were found to be more productive, open to interaction and more focused and happier with their jobs. Noise itself can have negative affects on health including increased stress, heart disease, stress, sleep disturbance and more.
Through three evaluation methods the results in the wellness centre showed that temperatures ranged between 18.9°C and 26.6°C and the humidity reached a maximum of 39.8%, which was found to be suitable according to standards. Older users of the case space were more sensitive towards humidity and perceived the treatment rooms to be more humid when compared to the exercise rooms. Correlations were found between the demographic and space usage data of the participants. All of the data obtained showed that age, frequency of visit and purpose of visit were factors that affected the occupants’ perceptions of the space. The more control people had over the IEQ in the space the more comfortable they were.
(Department of Interior Architecture, Çankaya University Faculty of Architecture, Ankara, Turkey,October 3rd 2019)
This case study researches how hotel-like attributes can influence people’s well-being. They predicted that hotel-like products and services would enhance patients’ perceived well-being. They used evidence-based design as well as surveys. The EBS gave evidence that the quality of the physical environments and a service-oriented culture in health care could positively affect the quality of care and the medical outcomes patients receive. The article talks about the concept of restorative servicescapes which is a concept they used to examine how positive environmental stimuli can be used to get desirable customer outcomes. Servicescape was developed as a theoretical test to demonstrate how physical design, ambience, wayfinding,social,natural and cyber aspects of the environment can influence consumers and employees.
18 different hypotheses are tested and explored throughout the research. One of the research methods was an online survey which was sent to patients who had spent at least one night in a hospital in the previous 6 months. The first section of the survey included situational questions related to the subject’s hospital stays like their duration and frequency and also their perceived mental and physical health. The second section had questions about the importance that they may place on specific hotel-like products and service. The third section of the survey asked them to rate the level of well-being they would feel from staying at the hypothetical hotel-like hospital room, and their likelihood to choose to pay more money for such a room.
The results from the survey showed that in terms of hotel-like products, luxery bed linin was the most important and Hospitality-certified health care staff was the most important hotel-like service attribute. The patients thought that the service like attributes were more important than the products.
Stage two tested on a “less healthy group” of patients and a “more healthy” group of patients. The less healthy patients benefited from both product and services. The healthier patients only the hotel like services resulted in higher well being. The results indicated that the less healthy group may be more likely to derive greater restorative benefits from hotel like hospital rooms and were also more willing to pay out of pocket expenses for the hotel like services whereas the healthier patients were not.
(Makarand Mody,October 8th 2019)
Restorative Servicescapes in Health Care: Examining the Influence of Hotel-Like Attributes on Patient Well-Being
