Chandra Sekhar

• Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a rapid and dramatic shift in the number of people working from home. For ASHRAE, the shift to more work from home has an impact directly on its members who work from home and indirectly on those ASHRAE members serve. Most notably, key metrics for performance of the built environment, including occupant health, p...

The ongoing project 'Bedroom Ventilation and Sleep Quality' investigates the effects of bedroom ventilation on sleep quality and next-day cognitive performance. As part of the project, 84 bedrooms in the Greater Copenhagen area of Denmark were inspected during the 2020 heating season. In the first week, participants slept under environmental condit...

A four-week-long field intervention experiment was conducted in twenty-nine bedrooms with extract ventilation systems and air inlet vents. During the first week no interventions took place. In the three weeks that followed, each participant slept for one week under a low, medium, and high ventilation rate condition in a balanced order. These condit...

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and sleep quality measurements over a period of two weeks were performed all night in 40 bedrooms in Denmark during the heating season. In the first week, the bedroom conditions were typical of what participants would normally experience during sleep. In the second week, the participants were asked to open the doors or wind...

Parameters describing the bedroom environment and sleep quality were measured overnight for one week in 84 randomly selected actual bedrooms in Denmark from September to December 2020. The median age of participants was 26 years (interquartile range (IQR) (Laverge et al., 2015; Fan et al., 2021; Berglund et al., 1999; Zhang et al., 2016; Bjorvatn e...

Some infectious diseases, including COVID-19, can undergo airborne transmission. This may happen at close proximity, but as time indoors increases, infections can occur in shared room air despite distancing. We propose two indicators of infection risk for this situation, that is, relative risk parameter (Hr) and risk parameter (H). They combine the...

Poor air quality has been shown to reduce sleep quality. There is a limited number of studies reporting how occupants rate the air quality in their bedrooms. The present study sheds the light on this issue. It was conducted in actual bedrooms and asked occupants to rate air quality once awake in the morning using an online sleep diary. The study wa...

We performed a survey of the types of bedroom ventilation in Danish dwellings (January–February 2020) and the associated subjective sleep quality. Five hundred and seventeen people responded. Their median age was 33 years old and 55.4% of them were males. We used an online questionnaire and collected information on the type of bedroom ventilation,...

Looking further than COVID-19, some of the key messages: 1. We from now on should include the risk of indoor respiratory infections in our design of buildings and its ventilation. 2. Treat the air quality in a similar way as we are used to for water and food quality. 3. ‘Visualize’ the air quality by displaying monitoring values (e.g. CO2 concentra...

Some infectious diseases, including COVID-19, can be transmitted via aerosols that are emitted by an infectious person and inhaled by susceptible individuals. Most airborne transmission occurs at close proximity and is effectively reduced by physical distancing, but as time indoors increases, infections occur in those sharing room air despite maint...

Bedroom ventilation is crucial for providing good indoor air quality, which may contribute to achieving undisturbed sleep. This study presents a detailed characterization of bedroom carbon dioxide (CO2) profiles and ventilation during the heating season in Denmark. The measurements were made in a naturally ventilated (NV) semi-detached house, equip...

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused untold disruption and enhanced mortality rates around the world. Understanding the mechanisms for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is key to preventing further spread but there is confusion over the meaning of “airborne” whenever transmission is discussed. Scientific ambivalence originates from evidence published many yea...

Good sleep is essential for our health and daytime functioning; seven to nine hours of sleep each night are recommended for people age 18 to 64.(1,2) Noise, light, temperature and air quality affect our sleep. However, very few regulations address indoor air quality (IAQ) in bedrooms, and even fewer studies examine the relationship between sleep qu...

Sleep is essential for our health and well-being. Some research suggests that air quality influences sleep quality in bedrooms, but the evidence is limited. Research, until now, has focused on how indoor air quality affects health, comfort, and cognitive performance during waking hours. Less information is available on the levels of indoor air qual...

During the rapid rise in COVID-19 illnesses and deaths globally, and notwithstanding recommended precautions, questions are voiced about routes of transmission for this pandemic disease. Inhaling small airborne droplets is probable as a third route of infection, in addition to more widely recognized transmission via larger respiratory droplets and...