An epidemiological approach to studying building indoor climate

We propose a new approach to studying indoor climate performance, using epidemiological frameworks. Through an 'indoor climate epidemiology' (ICE) approach, a building population-level, empirical, whole-system research strategy is proposed, to bring together building physicists, engineers, public health specialists, sociologists, and economists in an interdisciplinary effort. ICE will be concerned with frequency and pattern of building related health events in a population of buildings, will search for their determinants, and will apply knowledge gained to practice, avoiding such occurrences in the future. We would be borrowing the methodological structure, the research designs and analysis techniques, and the inherent scalability to work with both individual buildings and building stocks from epidemiological frameworks. In this work we summarize our proposed methodological framework for ICE, adapting strategies from epidemiology.