An Assessment of the Overall Comfort Sensation in Workplaces

The scope of the research described in this paper is to develop, evaluate and propose a new empirical index, the so-called Index of Workplace Comfort (IWC), which quantifies the overall comfort sensation of a user in an office building. The proposed Index of Workplace Comfort is calculated on the basis of both environmental and psychological properly weighted sensation votes of workplace occupants. The weight of 13 variables in the equation of IWC is determined through ordered probit regression in a dataset, using a background questionnaire completed by 238 individuals working in 11 office buildings. The evaluation of the proposed index consisted of the implementation of the IWC model in a building (52 cases) and the comparison with data collected from thermal comfort measurements based on ISO 7730 (159 cases) and thermal sensation votes of the occupants (321 cases). The findings show, with statistical significance, that the IWC describes the overall comfort conditions better than the PMV-PPD model used in ISO 7730 and supports the position that psychological variables affect the overall comfort sensation of individuals in a workplace.