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The purpose of this study is to investigate the combined impact of mask-wearing on cognitive performance and risk-taking behaviors. Participants were divided into a control group (N=24) without and an experimental group (N=27) with a surgical mask. Both groups completed the tasks in a warm environment (30 oC) where the conditions can reduce cognition and decision-making as well. These conditions are common in indoor spaces without sufficient air conditioning during a heat wave. Cognition and risk-taking behaviors were assessed using computerized tests. Results showed that mask-wearing in warm environment did not negatively impact cognitive performance, nor did it increase risk-taking behavior as the concept of risk compensation predicts, even when the CO2 concentration was elevated to approximately 29,000 ppm on average inside the mask. On the contrary, mask-wearing participants showed less risk-taking behaviors, slightly better response inhibition and better short-term memory. These results do not support previous findings suggesting that even a moderately increased indoor CO2 level can reduce cognition. We hypothesize that human adaptation effects (due to mask-wearing on a daily basis) make people less vulnerable to the adverse environment (i.e., excessive air temperature and CO2 levels), which will be investigated in the future studies. 

The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of wearable cooling in improving thermal comfort for a warm environment that would become prevalent due to more frequent extreme weather events, especially when air conditioning is not accessible for many developing countries. The experiment was conducted in an environment room with air temperature maintained at 31 °C and relative humidity at 55%. The study tested 30 participants using a wearable cooling device at the upper back location, while another 30 had no local cooling as the control group. Participants’ thermal comfort, thermal sensation and other metrics were assessed three times for a test session. The clothing insulation was 0.36 clo to simulate summer attire. The results showed significantly lower average local and whole-body thermal sensation for the participants with the wearable cooling device than the control group by considering all the votes during the entire session. Compared to the baseline, in particular, the local cooling group indicated a significant reduction in local thermal sensation for all three times of self-evaluation. Nevertheless, the reduction in overall thermal sensation occurred right after the local cooling was applied. Such a significant reduction was not observed after a while and then emerged again during the test, indicating an interactive phenomenon involving thermal adaptation and comfort restoration which will be investigated in the future. 

During COVID-19 pandemic, people’s lifestyles have been changed dramatically and an increase of depression among young adults has been observed. Most universities or colleges offered online courses instead to prevent COVID transmission. Typically, home environment is not designed for work or learning. Despite that the relationships between indoor environment quality (IEQ) and people’s physical health and work performance have been investigated in regular time, very few efforts have been taken to understand the relationship between IEQ and students’ mental health and learning performance during COVID-19 when mental health and learning have become more crucial due to the face-to-face classes suspension, stay-at-home policies. The research gap exists on how IEQ at home or similar residential buildings is related to mental health and learning. This work aims to 1) understand how indoor environmental (such as thermal, air quality, lighting, acoustic) satisfaction is related to college students’ mental health and learning performance, and 2) predict depression with IEQ satisfaction. 

Thermal comfort (TC) – how comfortable or satisfied a per- son is with the temperature of her/his surroundings – is one of the key factors influencing the indoor environmental quality of schools, libraries, and offices. We conducted an experiment to explore how TC can impact students’ learning. University students (n = 25) were randomly assigned to different temperature conditions in an office environment (25◦C → 30◦C, or 30◦C → 25◦C) that were implemented using a combination of heaters and air conditioners over a 1.25 hour session. The task of the participants was to learn from tutorial videos on three different topics, and a test was given after each tutorial. The results suggest that (1) changing the room temperature by a few degrees Celsius can stat. sig. impact students’ self-reported TC; (2) the relationship between TC and learning exhibited an inverted U-curve, i.e., should be neither too uncomfortable nor too comfortable. We also explored different computer vision and sensor-based approaches to measure students’ thermal comfort automatically. We found that (3) TC can be predicted automatically either from the room temperature or from an infra-red (IR) camera of the face; however, (4) TC prediction from a normal (visible-light) web camera is highly challenging, and only limited predictive power was found in the facial expression features to predict thermal comfort.