Experimental study on a bedside personalized ventilation system for improving sleep comfort and quality

Abstract

A bedside personalized ventilation (PV) system was investigated by experiments on human subjects including children, adults and elderly. Short-term exposure experiment was first carried out to find out the subjects’ perception of air movement and temperature and the effect on falling asleep. Through the comparative analysis of subjective questionnaires returned from participants and objective physiological tests in all-night sleep experiments, the influence of this system on sleep comfort and quality was obtained as well as the optimal system operation parameters. For conditions with bedside PV system, the returned questionnaires from participants reflected the thermal comfort level and subjective sleep quality were relatively higher than condition without the PV system. Physiological tests results like heart rate and heart rate variability also indicated that a calmer and more comfortable sleep could be obtained with this system. Bedside, PV system could provide a more obvious positive impact on children than adults in sleep quality, and the impact on elderly subjects was not significant. Optimal conditions for improving sleep comfort and quality are to keep the room ambient temperature at 22℃, PV outlet air temperature at 21℃ and air velocity of breathing zone at 0.1 m/s. Through this study, potential applications of bedside PV system could benefit human sleep comfort and quality, particularly in summer which could also be of benefit to hospital care of patients.