Objective

People spend 90 percent or more of their time working and living inside buildings, where they are exposed among others to thermal, visual, olfactory, acoustic and design indoor conditions. The Team Healthy Living Spaces, which consists of the Healthy Living Spaces lab at the Institute for Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine and the Chair of Healthy Living Spaces at the Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University, forms an interfaculty and interdisciplinary bridge between architecture, medicine, psychology, and other disciplines in this context. The objectives are to research so-called building-related physical and mental health and mood disorders, analyze sources of disturbance, and develop innovative, preventive and sustainable approaches to the design of living spaces, especially in buildings and their surroundings, . Of interest in this context are thresholds between exposures that are considered beneficial, influence well-being or performance, or ultimately lead to health impairment or illness. The aim is to enable significantly improved predictions of stress in the context of dynamic and changing boundary conditions, such as climate and demographic change.

Research topics

• Thermal, visual, olfactory, and acoustic stressors and their associations with mood disorders and selected health parameters in different populations
• Human-building resilience and possible interventions to increase it
• Multimodal and dynamic exposures and the associated human physical, psychological, behavioural, and social adaptation mechanisms

Team

Head

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Marcel Schweiker

Members

see German version