Indoor air quality and human activities in buildings

Abstract

People spend most of their time indoors either at home or at work. If the indoor environment is polluted, the occupants may experience number of possible health conditions such as sneezing, fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, irritability, and respiratory diseases as asthma. Also, long term exposure into the pollutants can cause more serious health effects. Therefore it is very important to maintain a high degree of hygienic level in all our buildings by achieving a proper design and maintaining an adequate ventilation system in the indoor environment. There are different types of ventilation that can be used in the indoor environment such as free running systems by opening windows and doors, fans and air conditioners. But due to the poor operational practices in the modern buildings such as restricting free ventilation by closing doors and windows in most of the time and no proper maintenance in the air conditioning system may pollute the indoor environment. Therefore numerous forms of indoor air pollution are possible in the modern buildings. In this paper, recent research is revised on effect of air freshener and tobacco smoke on indoor environment with modern operational practices.