Combined effects of acoustic, thermal, and illumination on human perception and performance: A review

The overall human comfort is stimulated by several environment factors simultaneously, mainly including thermal, acoustic, and illuminous environments. However, technical standards and design guidelines typically focus on a single environmental factor separately. In order to find out how different environmental factors interact in affecting the human overall comfort, this paper collects literatures which were published after 2000 and aimed at the researches on human perception and performance under acoustic, thermal, and illumination. The literatures are classified according to research methods—that are field study and climate chamber experiment, firstly, and the methodological approaches in terms of experimental design, subjects selection, human comfort assessment methods are also presented. Then the relationships between different environmental factors and occupants’ perception are summarized and compared. This comparison indicates that one kind of human perception is subjected to different environmental factors and the one-vote veto power of each kind of human perception upon overall human comfort cannot be neglected. This paper also discussed some potential improvements and future developments on the research field of overall human comfort. Having collected and reviewed the relative literatures published in the past decades. Physiological data and machine learning, which are merely used in the research filed of human overall comfort under acoustic, thermal, and illumination, is highly recommended to be adopted in the future. This literature survey may provide a reference for further investigations of a deeper understanding, modeling, or prediction between the multiple environmental factors and overall human comfort.