An effective alerting strategy to facilitate occupants' perception of indoor air quality: By alarming concentration of indoor air pollution.

Previous studies have proven that it is hard for occupants to perceive concentration of indoor air pollution (IAP) and resulting indoor air quality (IAQ) on their own. Therefore, a method is needed to encourage them to turn their attention to actual IAP, in this context, alerting is thus suggested. However, previous studies pose limitations in that they failed to analyze the effects of alerting concentration of IAP on occupants' IAQ perception. To fill the research gap, this study sought to explore a proper strategy to help occupants have a clearer perception of IAQ. A one-month observational experiment was conducted on nine subjects under three scenarios with different alerting strategies. In addition, the visual distance estimation method was used to quantitatively analyze similar tendencies between the subject's perceived IAQ and concentration of IAP for each scenario. The experimental results confirmed that when an alerting notification was not sent, the occupants could not clearly perceive IAQ as the visual distance was the highest at 0.332. On the other hand, when the alerting notification whether the concentration of IAP exceeded the standard or not was sent, the occupants could perceive IAQ relatively clearly as the visual distance was reduced to 0.291 and 0.236. In conclusion, not only installing a monitoring device but also establishing proper alerting strategies on the concentration of IAP is essential to facilitate occupants' IAQ perception and protect occupants' health.