Embodied thermal environments: an examination of older-people's sensory experiences in a variety of residential types

Assessment of and Improvement Strategies for the Housing of Healthy Elderly: Improving Quality of Life

“…The four parameters derived by Frontczak and Wargocki in their 2011 paper on the comfort of indoors environment are "thermal, visual, acoustic environment and air quality" [38]. They encompass the adjustment of and response to room temperatures [39][40][41], the intensity of lighting (natural and artificial) [11,37,42,43], indoor color schemes [37], indoor ventilation and air quality [38,44], noise disturbances [45], and even the fact that improvements in the aesthetical appearance of a physical environment may directly affect people's subjective well being [36,37].…”

Low carbon thermal technologies in an ageing society – What are the issues?

“…In the extra care housing as well the discourse of biological ageing clearly also held great sway and had influenced a lot of the design decisions. Here, although with good intentions, it meant that the design was less well suited to the diversity of residents that might live there, and led to frustrations among some residents, for example in not being able to open windows or turn down heaters (Lewis, 2015, andHenshaw and. Here, there could be a poor fit between technologies, configurations and inhabitants, leading to a situation where some residents might experience the risk averse design as quite oppressive.…”

“…This strongly suggests that conceptions of vulnerability, although underpinned by concerns about tangible physiological ageing and its effects, are culturally constructed, and in the UK context, given the rather chilly and damp climate, and historically draughty housing, fears about cold are dominant. This leads to the risk aversion that Neven et al note, with the whole socio-technical system of the residential home aiming for a uniformly very warm environment, but paradoxically one which other research has pointed out may put residents at risk of overheating (Brown and Walker, 2008;Lewis, 2015), as well as leaving them sensorily deprived as Henshaw and Guy (2015) discuss.…”

“…In work by Humes and Tweed, not reported here, although the independent living participants themselves did not seem to think very much in those terms (not perhaps seeing themselves as older people), their issues with the physical difficulty of some aspects of low carbon technologies such as biomass burners and wood burners -where fuel had to be collected, pellets moved around in heavy bags and poured into hoppers -do raise questions of how this might work with significantly more aged people. Henshaw and Guy (2015) noted that some project participants cited increased noise sensitivity which was a factor in them being annoyed by extractor fans and ventilation systems which were necessary in some building comfort configurations; noise was also a consideration for some people regarding heat pumps. At the same time though, Henshaw and Guy draw attention to the older participants' wish for sensory stimulation of more positive kinds associated with warming, ventilation and cooling, such as the look of a fire or a fresh breeze through a window -though there was diversity in the specifics of what people liked and missed.…”

Conditioning Demand: Older people, thermal comfort and low-carbon housing

“…Also, the greater the scale and cost of any interventions made by occupants, the more likely it is that occupants will want to achieve multiple goals, such as improved thermal comfort, enhanced usability of the home and greater energy efficiency. Henshaw and Guy (2015) compare and contrast the experiences of older occupants living in a range of housing-types including private houses, extra-care housing and residential care homes. They consider how older occupants' experience of LCTs and traditional thermal technologies is affected by sensory stimulus, including non-thermal information such as auditory and olfactory stimuli, and how this influences the management and maintenance of thermal technologies.…”