ABSTRACT
Environmental conditions can potentially have an impact on comfort, performance/productivity and health – as well as on resource use such as fossil fuels. The research approach for assessing thermal comfort is twofold: Identifying the key parameters to be addressed and determining methods to collect and assess each parameter. The predictive model of thermal comfort mainly focuses on physical and physiological mechanisms, whereby thermal comfort is considered primarily as a heat balance problem with adaptive mechanisms conceptually treated as 'noise' in the system that is maintained at fixed levels in the chamber experiments which were used to develop the model. The physiological effects of extreme temperatures on the human body have been widely investigated. Human exposure to very low temperatures could lead to hypothermia, which in turn may cause the clinical symptoms of uncontrollable shivering, memory lapse, drowsiness, frostnip and frostbite; it may also trigger or worsen asthma and cold sores, cause increased blood pressure and freezing and non-freezing injuries.
