A Lifecycle Health Performance Tree for Sustainable Healthy Buildings

Abstract

A residential environment configured under inappropriate architectural planning could have a harmful influence on the health of users. Such an issue has led to requirements to improve and to evaluate the health performance of buildings. A proper health performance evaluation would aid tenants or purchasers to make a suitable decision, while also providing building owners and house sellers with useful information regarding the health performance of the buildings. The overall health performance of a building should not merely be a total evaluation score of factors, but a framework that reflects the characteristics and importance of each health-affecting factor. In addition, the overall health performance should include a concept that would enable the use of the tool to estimate and improve the health performance not only at the actual operational stage after completion of a building but over the entire lifecycle including planning, design and construction. To this end, a lifecycle health performance tree (LHT) for sustainable healthy buildings has been developed by this study. Unlike the existing method, which measures the indoor air quality, light and noise factors of a completed space, LHT provides an overall evaluation of the health performance of a space during planning.

A Health Performance and Cost Optimization Model for Sustainable Healthy Buildings

“…According to the studies and literature, the health performance of a project is represented by the total health performance of spaces that compose the project studies (Zheng et al, 2011;Lee et al, 2012a). Here, the space refers to buildings, floors and housing units or rooms.…”

“…The HPE module herein uses Equations (1), which was presented in previous studies (Zheng et al, 2011;Lee et al, 2012a) and adopts the HPE model structure (Lee et al, 2013) to estimate health performance. According to the studies and literature, the health performance of a project is represented by the total health performance of spaces that compose the project studies (Zheng et al, 2011;Lee et al, 2012a).…”

“…Each evaluation factor is associated with a different calculation method, even though they belong to a single health performance and the same is applicable to each health performance value. Therefore, aggregation of health performance should be classified and quantified using formula weights for each indicator (Lee, 2012a;Lim, 2013b). …”

“…To construct a sustainable and healthy building, it is necessary to build a system capable of easily and quickly evaluating the health performance data of the resources needed (Jeong, 2000;Lee, 2005; Lee et al, 2013;Kim, 2012) and able to efficiently analyze, assess and manage the health performance of space through the building over its life cycle (Zheng et al, 2011;Lee et al, 2012a;Lee, 2007;Cho et al, 2010). However, previous studies have revolved around building performance evaluation limited to the specific building dimensions (Zheng, 2011;Todorovic, 2012; Lee et al, 2012b), as described through healthy building development theories (Lee, 2005;Cho, 2010), evaluation metrics (Yu, 2011), pollutant discharge by building materials (Huang and Haghighat, 2002) and indoor air quality (IAQ).…”

“…However, previous studies have revolved around building performance evaluation limited to the specific building dimensions (Zheng, 2011;Todorovic, 2012; Lee et al, 2012b), as described through healthy building development theories (Lee, 2005;Cho, 2010), evaluation metrics (Yu, 2011), pollutant discharge by building materials (Huang and Haghighat, 2002) and indoor air quality (IAQ). To assess health performance in relation to these various dimensions, the concept of a health-friendly resources database (HRDB) (Lee et al, 2012b), life cycle health-performance tree (LHT) (Lee et al, 2012a), health performance evaluation (HPE) (Lee et al, 2013) and life cycle health management (LHM) (Lim et al, 2013a) were developed.…”