Variables That Affect Thermal Comfort and Its Measuring Instruments: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Thermal comfort can impact the general behavior of the occupants, and considering that humans currently perform 90% of their daily work indoors, it is necessary to improve the accuracy of thermal comfort assessments, and a correct selection of variables could make this possible. However, no review integrates all the variables that could influence thermal comfort evaluation, which relates them to their respective capture devices. For this reason, this research identifies all the variables that influence the thermal comfort of a building, together with the measurement tools for these variables, evaluating the relevance of each one in the research carried out to date. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was carried out by analyzing a set of articles selected under certain defined inclusion/exclusion criteria. In this way, it became evident that the most used variables to measure thermal comfort are the same as those used by the predicted mean vote (PMV) model; however, research focused on the behavior of the occupants has focused on new variables that seek to respond to individual differences in human thermal perception.