Making a Healthy Living Space Through the Concept of Healthy Building of Building Medicine

Abstract

Planning, diagnosis, and management of the healthy living space are crucial to human health management. Modern people spend at least half of the time indoor for their domestic lives, working lives, education, medical treatments or entertainment activities. Some of them even spend more than two-third of the time indoor, such as educators or health professionals. In terms of medical science, four categories affect the health of modern people—genetic inheritance, environment, life style, and health care. The environment category includes biological, physical and chemical factors, such as bacterium and excess funguses which influence indoor air quality (IAQ), radiation in buildings, and formaldehyde in harmful building materials. Furthermore, World Health Organization (WHO) also set forth a set of standards for healthy buildings, which lists fifteen recommendations for building planning. These standards are closely connected with the planning of healthy indoor environment. This study aims to diagnose and manage healthy living space with the concept of healthy building in the field of Building Medicine. This subject can be divided into three parts: Physical Health of the Buildings, Environmental Health, and User’s Safety and Health. More emphasis is placed on the aspect of the Users’ Health. It is hoped that through the investigation of the interrelationship between problems in building environment with human heath, harmful elements which damage the health of building occupants can be discovered. Also, with the assistance of non-destructive testing technology, cases are diagnosed following WHO’s standards on healthy buildings and health hazards hidden in the environment are pointed out to readers. These hazards include: harmful building materials, radiation emitted by steel bars, high frequency electromagnetic waves, electromagnetic fields (EMF), residual chlorine in drinking water, turbidity of drinking water, pH values in drinking water, noise, sunlight ratio, temperature and humidity, O2 content, hazardous particles, total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs), formaldehyde, CO, CO2, and O3. Finally, following the concept of human medical science, this study suggests remedies and preventive measures for these problems so that the problems can be diagnosed and treated early, which is parallel to the secondary prevention stage of the disease prevention in medical science.