After the release of WELL Building Standard in 2014 and Fitwel in 2017, the construction industry has been increasingly focusing on occupants health and wellbeing. This new generation of green building certification schemes was welcomed by AEE as it corresponds with our priorities as designers and engineers.
Wellness in the workplace and at home has multiple facets including:
- Air Quality – focused on maintaining excellent indoor air quality, precisely monitoring and recording a wide range of air pollutants, and employing strategies for preventing or removing pollutants from the occupied zones.
- Water Quality – focused on providing potable water with excellent quality, monitoring a wide range of water contaminants and pollutants and effectively removing them by filtration and enhanced plumbing and drainage services
- Nourishment – focused on providing healthy food and beverage choices to tenants and educating and encouraging them to maintain a healthy diet
- Light and Daylight Quality – focused on providing indoor lighting with excellent illumance, illuminance uniformity, glare control and colour rendering properties as well as promoting the health impact of circadian lighting and maximizing the available natural daylight
- Movement and Fitness – focused on employing various design strategies and technological solutions to encourage and reward occupants to incorporate physical activity in their daily routine
- Thermal Comfort – focused on designing and maintaining thermal environment that limits discomfort and complaints and maximizes activity, concentration and productivity
- Sound, Noise and Aural Comfort – focused on designing an excellent acoustic environment with regards to limiting sound levels from outdoor background noise and indoor equipment and MEP noise, enhancing privacy by optimized sound barriers, reverberation time that supports speech intelligibility, and introducing sound masking and enhanced speech intelligibility by high-performance audio technology
- Building and Fitout Materials Selection – focused on eliminating materials hazardous for humans such as lead and chromate copper arsenate (CCA), mitigating contamination, selecting materials to minimize emissions of VOCs, HFR, PFAS, Mercury and other chemical pollutants, reduce waste generation and promote recycling, and avoid using harmful pesticides and cleaning products.
- Mind and Psychological Health – focused on promoting mental health and wellbeing through policy, program and design strategies that seek to address the diverse factors that influence cognitive and emotional well-being.
