Marcel Schweiker

Marcel Schweiker
University Hospital RWTH Aachen · Institute for Occupational Social and Environmental Medicine

Professor

About

187
Publications
63,514
Reads
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4,668
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2010 - March 2020
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Position
  • Head of Department
October 2006 - March 2010
Tokyo City University
Position
  • PhD Student

Publications

Publications (187)
Article
Full-text available
Purpose During hospitalization, circadian rhythms and sleep are often disrupted, which has negative effects on health outcomes. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether a daylight intervention in the morning could improve the circadian rhythms of cortisol and melatonin and enhance objective and subjective sleep quality in geriatric patients. Met...
Article
Allein für das Heizen von Gebäuden nutzt Deutschland im Winter mehr als 50 % des gesamten Endenergieverbrauchs. Damit gehen entsprechende klimaverändernde Nebenwirkungen einher. Allerdings erreicht nur ein minimaler Bruchteil des Aufwands die Menschen. Die Effizienz in Bezug auf den unmittelbaren menschlichen Nutzen ist entsprechend gering. Akkubet...
Article
Full-text available
[Open Access] While healthy buildings are investigated in academic research, practice, and policy, they often fail to address the needs and gaps due to insufficient knowledge transfer between them. Moreover, there is no general definition of healthy buildings that could act as a reference for different stakeholders of the building sector. Therefore...
Article
Most studies regarding the investigation of occupant behaviour (OB) in school classrooms addressed the environmental influence on window operation solely and were conducted in oceanic climates. This study aimed to identify and quantify the influence of multi-domain factors (including thermal, indoor air quality, contextual and multi-behaviour domai...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Occupant-centric studies in building science have prevalently overlooked causal inference, resulting in a lack of valid causal results. We highlight this fundamental deficit in existing studies and aim to promote causal inference as the foundation for transparent cumulative research. Through concrete examples, we pragmatically introduce the concept...
Article
Introduction Studies support the association of core body temperature with the circadian rhythm and cognitive performance aspects, including alertness. Additionally, evidence shows that lower ambient temperatures improve cognitive performance. However, less is known on the dynamic effect of ambient temperature on alertness, which could also follow...
Article
Introduction The distinction between distress and eustress is known beyond occupational medicine for decades. However, current practices considering physical conditions at work-places, such as room temperatures, focus on the avoidance of distress and the provision of stable conditions within small exposure ranges. Initial studies suggest benefits o...
Preprint
Full-text available
PURPOSE: During hospitalization, circadian rhythms and sleep are often disrupted, which has negative effects on health outcomes. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether a daylight intervention in the morning could improve the circadian rhythms of cortisol and melatonin and enhance objective and subjective sleep quality in geriatric patients. MET...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in working from home worldwide, making the work-from-home (WFH) setting a crucial context for studying the influence of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) on workers’ well-being and productivity. A narrative and visual synthesis of 41 research articles on IEQ in WFH settings was conducted to i...
Article
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The consequences of climate change are already visible, and yet, its effect on psychosocial factors, including the expression of empathy, affect, and social disconnection, is widely unknown. Outdoor conditions are expected to influence indoor conditions. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of indoor air temperature during...
Article
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Rising global temperatures have increased the need for research into human adaptability and comfort in buildings. To reduce comfort-related energy demands, low-energy-consumption alternatives for space cooling, such as personal environmental control systems (PECS), are being investigated. The implementation of PECS in office buildings is still unde...
Article
Cross-modal effects have recently become a popular topic in building science. However, studies in this area frequently neglect causal inference, leading to a lack of valid causal results. To address this problem, we specifically highlight causality and its importance to cross-modal research. We present three general guidelines, and describe them us...
Article
The urgency to address the environmental impacts of the building sector, particularly emissions allocated to building operation, necessitates immediate, informed action. Occupant behaviour is a known driver of building operational emissions. Use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices holds great potential in mitigating and distributing occupancy-drive...
Article
Background Deep learning is a promising way to improve health care. Image-processing medical disciplines, such as pathology, are expected to be transformed by deep learning. The first clinically applicable deep-learning diagnostic support tools are already available in cancer pathology, and their number is increasing. However, data on the environme...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The built environment influences health. The Healthy Cities Movement focuses on creating healthier and more sustainable cities, including healthy urban design. This focus on health is essential in an age of climate change, urban density, and inequality where planners, developers, and communities have the responsibility to design healthy places for...
Article
There are important reasons to offer building users the possibility to adjust indoor-environmental conditions. For one thing, people sharing the same indoor environment, may have different needs, requirements, and preferences. The same set of conditions would thus not satisfy everyone. Moreover, even an individual user's preferences can change cons...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background. Building codes for thermal conditions rely on comfort models introduced over 30 years ago, which can require energy-intensive air conditioning (AC) to meet certain measures. The standards considering thermal comfort models, such as the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model, rely on data from subjective responses and physical environmental par...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background. Building performance can be assessed using a wide array of performance metrics, including daylight performance, occupant comfort, wellbeing and building energy consumption. Depending on which performance metric is used to support design decision making, the design outcome may vary greatly. The challenges of evaluating compromises betwee...
Chapter
The preceding parts presented the path from the desire for knowledge via methods, fundamentals and the inherent use of numbers and patterns to gaining knowledge for various disciplines and projects. This chapter deals with the communication cultures in sciences and humanities. Here, the focus is not only on a scientific publication as the “Endprodu...
Chapter
Thermal comfort and thermal pain are two independent phenomena studied by different disciplines. The research field of thermal comfort deals with the adaptation of perception of thermal conditions at the workplace. That of thermal pain with sensory and emotional perceptions of painful heat stimuli and its adaptation.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Test room experiments allow to study human-building interactions under controlled environmental boundaries. Differences in experimental design, methods, and contextual variables specific to the location and test room features, result in experimental outcomes that are difficult to generalize and compare. This paper presents an international Round Ro...
Article
Full-text available
Thermal comfort models can be used to gain insight into important building design variables and predict whether a given design will provide satisfactory thermal conditions. There is a need for better industry standards and awareness towards thermal comfort as a multi-domain construct is increasing. However, despite the research efforts of academics...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again emphasized indoor air quality (IAQ) as a fundamental path for preventing airborne virus transmission, especially in indoor environments with increased ventilation needs due to high occupancy and long exposure time, such as school classrooms. In naturally ventilated classrooms, thermal and IAQ conditions are main...
Article
Full-text available
An expected increase in the use of air conditioning by 2050 will significantly increase electricity demand and come at a cost to the environment. Implementing passive cooling strategies and focusing on personal environmental control systems (PECSs) could help to address this issue. While numerous studies have investigated the positive impact of PEC...
Article
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Physical exercise demonstrates a special case of aerosol emission due to its associated elevated breathing rate. This can lead to a faster spread of airborne viruses and respiratory diseases. Therefore, this study investigates cross-infection risk during training. Twelve human subjects exercised on a cycle ergometer under three mask scenarios: no m...
Article
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The solvent 1,3-dichlorobenzene (1,3-DCB) is formed during thermal decomposition of the initiator 2,4-dichlorobenzoylperoxide in the production of silicone rubber with potential exposure of production workers as shown in previous works. Despite a threshold limit value (MAK value) of 2 ppm in air, there are currently no data about the corresponding...
Book
Full-text available
Guidelines for low energy building design based on the adaptive thermal comfort concept - Technical report: IEA EBC Annex 69: Strategy and Practice of Adaptive Thermal Comfort in Low Energy Buildings. The adaptive thermal comfort concept has been developed over many years and proven in numerous field studies (e.g. Webb 1964, Nicol and Humphreys 1...
Article
Full-text available
Buildings are expected to provide healthy and comfortable indoor environmental conditions for their users. Such conditions have diverse dimensions, including thermal, visual, air quality, auditory, and olfactory aspects. Indoor environmental quality standards, guidelines, and codes typically inform professionals in the building design and operation...
Article
Occupants play a key role in determining final building energy consumption. Empirical evidence must support occupants' modelling. Experiments on human responses to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) are usually performed in test rooms or as in-field monitoring. Between these two approaches, living laboratories, often abbreviated as living labs, rep...
Article
The perception, physiology, behavior, and performance of building occupants are influenced by multi-domain exposures: the simultaneous presence of multiple environmental stimuli, i.e., visual, thermal, acoustic, and air quality. Despite being extensive, the literature on multi-domain exposures presents heterogeneous methodological approaches and in...
Article
The way buildings are operated highly influences energy consumption, and occupants play a significant role in it. However, challenges related to the prediction of occupants’ behavior decrease the potential to accurately predict a building’s energy consumption. Such inaccuracy presents one reason for the gap between measured and simulated energy dat...
Article
Full-text available
Heating and cooling indoor environments is responsible for the largest share of energy consumption in buildings [...]
Article
The number of occupancy and occupant behaviour models developed for building performance simulation (BPS) has steadily increased for the past four decades. However, their use is still limited in practice. This is partly due to the difficulty in understanding their utility and to the challenges related to their implementation into BPS. Both problems...
Article
Full-text available
Indian residences are vulnerable to heat-driven discomfort amid the mounting prevalence of weather extremes, residential design and construction practices, and densifying urbanscapes. Therefore, it is vital to understand the thermal comfort characteristics of nationwide residences. This study proposes an adaptive thermal comfort model based on year...
Article
Thermal comfort is fundamental to indoor environmental design and operation as well as indoor thermal environment evaluation. This paper has reviewed the historic evolution of thermal comfort research during the last century using a systematic approach and a particular focus on adaptive thermal comfort studies. A large number of published articles...
Article
Low-income households face long-standing challenges of energy insecurity and inequality (EII). During extreme events (e.g., disasters and pandemics) these challenges are especially severe for vulnerable populations reliant on energy for health, education, and well-being. However, many EII studies rarely incorporate the micro- and macro-perspectives...
Article
The adaptive thermal heat balance (ATHB) framework introduced a method to account for the three adaptive principals, namely physiological, behavioral, and psychological adaptation, individually within existing heat balance models. This work presents a more detailed theoretical framework together with a theory‐driven empirical determination toward a...
Article
Full-text available
Assessing comfort and predicting occupant behavior in the workplace has been a major topic within built environmental research. Despite the vast knowledge, several studies have reported a performance gap between the predicted and the actual behaviors in buildings, together with a discrepancy between predicted and reported comfort levels of occupant...
Article
To design and operate energy efficient and comfortable buildings it is important to know what the occupants’ preferences for indoor environmental quality would be. These preferences are related to a range of personal characteristics that occupants may or may not be willing to share. Preparing materials for a forthcoming stated preference discrete c...
Article
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...
Article
Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is a promising technology increasingly applied to various research fields, including building science and occupant comfort research. Using immersive virtual environments (IVEs), researchers explore important research questions related to how occupants perceive and interact with their indoor environment in response to...
Article
Full-text available
Earth is one of the oldest and till now intensively used natural building material. Around 30% of the world population still lives or works in buildings constructed out of earth. Most of them dwell in simple huts of rural communities or traditionally hand-crafted buildings. However, a growing number of people looking for healthy, environmentally fr...
Article
Full-text available
Occupants' satisfaction had been researched independently related to thermal and visual stimuli for many decades showing among others the influence of self-perceived control. Few studies revealed interactions between thermal and visual stimuli affecting occupant satisfaction. In addition, studies including interactions between thermal and visual st...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper provides a simplified calculation approach for determining a relative infection risk by aerosol-borne viruses in indoor environments, with which any room situation can be compared with a reference situation. The reference situation describes a classroom with mechanical ventilation, designed according to the current state of the art. This...
Article
Full-text available
Background The ultimate goal of pain research is to provide effective routes for pain relief. Nevertheless, the perception pain relief as a change in pain intensity and un‐/pleasantness has only been rarely investigated. It has been demonstrated that pain relief has rewarding and reinforcing properties, but it remains unknow whether the perception...
Article
Full-text available
Buildings’ expected (projected, simulated) energy use frequently does not match actual observations. This is commonly referred to as the energy performance gap. As such, many factors can contribute to the disagreement between expectations and observations. These include, for instance, uncertainty about buildings’ geometry, construction, systems, an...
Article
Detailed numerical analyses of temperature and air velocity distributions are relevant to assess thermal comfort in a wide range of applications. Until now mainly simulations based on Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations (RANS) are used, whereby fluctuations as well as anisotropy of the turbulence are represented with insufficient precision. T...
Article
Full-text available
Research related to personal comfort systems is growing due to their potential to improve an individual’s satisfaction with indoor environmental conditions while increasing energy efficiency. At moderately high indoor temperatures, the use of ceiling fans can be a low-energy cooling strategy to enhance comfort in a working environment. This paper s...
Article
In diesem Beitrag werden Ergebnisse eines Berechnungsverfahrens zur Bewertung eines relativen Infektionsrisikos vorgestellt, mit dem eine (beliebige) Raumsituation mit einer Referenzsituation verglichen werden kann. Die Referenzsituation beschreibt einen Klassenraum mit maschineller Belüftung, ausgelegt nach dem heutigen Stand der Technik. Dabei wi...
Preprint
Detailed numerical analyses of temperature and air velocity distributions are relevant to assess thermal comfort in a wide range of applications. Until now mainly simulations based on Reynolds-averaged Navier--Stokes equations (RANS) are used, whereby fluctuations as well as anisotropy of the turbulence are represented with insufficient precision....
Conference Paper
Traditional building design education in the disciplines of building services, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, etc. focusses on quantifiable factors, i.e. factors which can be subject of calculation, simulation and dimensioning. Since non-quantifiable factors are not part of calculation or simulation models, there is a tendency that they...
Article
Full-text available
A discussion of sustainability in architecture cannot be meaningfully carried out without the inclusion of most buildings’ central purpose, namely the provision of indoor environments that are accommodating of occupants’ needs and requirements. To this end, building designers and operators are expected to demonstrate compliance with codes and stand...
Article
In recent years, research has emerged to quantitatively and qualitatively understand occupants' interactions with buildings. However, there has been surprisingly little research on building interfaces and how their design, context (e.g., location), and underlying logic impact their usability and occupants’ perceived control, as well as the resultin...
Article
Despite the fact that buildings are designed for occupants in principle, evidence suggests buildings are often uncomfortable compared to the requirements of standards; difficult to control by occupants; and, operated inefficiently with regards to occupants’ preferences and presence. Meanwhile, practitioners –architects, engineers, technology compan...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The usage of "resilient" increased over the last decade reflecting anticipated changes in our climate and resulting necessary changes in our energy system. While resilience is popular, its usage varies to such extent that opposing consequences for the building design are promoted: robustness or flexibility. This paper questions whether resilient bu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Climate change has led to higher indoor temperatures and more discomfort hours. This fact has encouraged an extensive assessment of users' thermal comfort in office buildings. However, there is a gap between predicted-actual comfort votes and comfort-related behaviors. One reason could be differences in comfort expectations. This study investigates...
Article
Occupant behavior has a significant impact on building systems’ operations and efficiency. As a result, several innovative approaches have been introduced to quantify the dynamics of occupants within indoor environments, such as interactions with different building systems and the impact of various feedback and interventions to reduce the building...