Maedot S. Andargie

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Civil Engineering

Outdoor environmental noise is a major source of annoyance in urban areas and exposure to it can increase the risk of severe health issues. Consequently, it has been the focus of research for decades. Even though people spend the majority of their time indoors, most studies use outdoor noise levels and do not include indoor noise measurements to es...

The relationship between the demographical characteristics of building occupants and their perception of indoor comfort is increasingly being studied. However, the added value from accounting for such characteristics when modeling and predicting occupants' perceptions remains unclear. An incremental machine learning (ML) modeling and analysis appro...

Occupants’ comfort perception affects building energy consumptions. To improve the understanding of human comfort, which is crucial to reduce energy demand, laboratory experiments with humans in controlled environments (test rooms) are fundamental, but their potential also depends on the characteristic of each research facility. Nowadays, there is...

Multi-unit residential building (MURB) occupants often express dissatisfaction with their suites' acoustic conditions despite existing building acoustic standards and regulations as well as growing research on noise control and building acoustics. Reasons for this include the lack of proper characterization of acoustic comfort in MURBs and lack of...

Effective building management strategies require a clear understanding of how occupants perceive their indoor environmental conditions. Despite their important findings, previous studies were mostly limited to single-domain evaluations of the indoor environment (e.g., thermal, visual, acoustic, or air quality), and rarely considered general well-be...

Trends of urbanization, densification, and telework all point to increasing exposure to ambient noise for workers. With the lockdown policies implemented in response to COVID-19, a research opportunity to study perceived noise exposure for teleworking arose. This paper presents the results of a survey on noise issues in multi-unit residential build...

A sustainable building performance requires the efficient use of resources while providing a comfortable and healthy environment for building occupants. While energy efficiency and environmental comfort metrics are commonly studied in the literature, they are mostly evaluated independently, potentially overlooking conflicting relationships that may...

There is limited research on noise exposure in multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) despite the proven effects of noise on people’s physical and psychological health. This motivates the current study which aims to identify important noise sources in MURBs and investigate factors that impact acoustic comfort as well as determine the various impa...

Occupants are active participants in their built environment, affecting its performance while simultaneously being affected by its design and indoor environmental conditions. With recent advances in computer modeling, simulation tools, and analysis techniques, topics such as human-building interactions and occupant behavior have gained significant...

Building occupants are continuously exposed to multiple indoor environmental stimuli, including thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality related factors. Moreover, personal and contextual aspects can be regarded as additional domains influencing occupants’ perception and behaviour. The scientific literature in this area typically deals with these...

This paper presents an integrated data collection and analysis framework to comprehensively evaluate the impact of office indoor building environment on occupants’ comfort, satisfaction, and work performance. The latter includes the perceived productivity level of respondents as well as an objective measure of basic cognitive thinking skills. The f...

Aegis is a “smart” wireless-wristband alarm system that takes as input not a specific alarm time, as in traditional alarm systems, but rather a time interval specified by a user. The system then automatically chooses the optimal alarm time within that range to minimize sleep inertia in the user after waking. Worn as a wristband, Aegis continuously...