**Making a Healthy Living Space Through the Concept of Healthy Building of Building Medicine**

Chih-Yuan Chang *Feng Chia University, Taiwan* 

#### **1. Introduction**

92 Health Management – Different Approaches and Solutions

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> Planning, diagnosis, and management of the healthy living space are crucial to human health management. Modern people spend at least half of the time indoor for their domestic lives, working lives, education, medical treatments or entertainment activities. Some of them even spend more than two-third of the time indoor, such as educators or health professionals. In terms of medical science, four categories affect the health of modern people—genetic inheritance, environment, life style, and health care. The environment category includes biological, physical and chemical factors, such as bacterium and excess funguses which influence indoor air quality (IAQ), radiation in buildings, and formaldehyde in harmful building materials. Furthermore, World Health Organization (WHO) also set forth a set of standards for healthy buildings, which lists fifteen recommendations for building planning. These standards are closely connected with the planning of healthy indoor environment.

> This study aims to diagnose and manage healthy living space with the concept of healthy building in the field of Building Medicine. This subject can be divided into three parts: Physical Health of the Buildings, Environmental Health, and User's Safety and Health. More emphasis is placed on the aspect of the Users' Health. It is hoped that through the investigation of the interrelationship between problems in building environment with human heath, harmful elements which damage the health of building occupants can be discovered. Also, with the assistance of non-destructive testing technology, cases are diagnosed following WHO's standards on healthy buildings and health hazards hidden in the environment are pointed out to readers. These hazards include: harmful building materials, radiation emitted by steel bars, high frequency electromagnetic waves, electromagnetic fields (EMF), residual chlorine in drinking water, turbidity of drinking water, pH values in drinking water, noise, sunlight ratio, temperature and humidity, O2 content, hazardous particles, total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs), formaldehyde, CO, CO2, and O3. Finally, following the concept of human medical science, this study suggests remedies and preventive measures for these problems so that the problems can be diagnosed and treated early, which is parallel to the secondary prevention stage of the disease prevention in medical science.

Making a Healthy Living Space Through the Concept of Healthy Building of Building Medicine 95

reverse turn of thinking: In view of the speedy progress and thorough thinking of medical field, why not apply its well-developed health management mechanism and methods in the medical field analogously to building health management? In this way, architects or civil engineers who not only know how to design and construct buildings, they can also learn how to be building doctors and safeguard building safety and healthy living environments.

In medical science, cares and treatments are provided to humans from their birth and death. Based on its development trajectory, three roles are played by medical science. First, patients' pain is relieved and their health is restored through 'health care'. Second, through 'scientific researches,' causes and mechanisms of the diseases are investigated, and new treatments are discovered and developed. Third, through 'medical education,' knowledge of medical science and technology is passed down, and the bedrock of health care service and medical researches is constituted (Hsieh, 2003). The same principles are also applied to Building Medicine. Although the subject managed by Building Medicine is a building, Building Medicine also play similar roles as medical science does. It maintains a building's health through health care, scientific researches, and medical education of buildings. The safety and health of the occupants can only be safeguarded on the condition that the occupied buildings are in a healthy state. See Figure 2 for the roles played by Building Medicine. Pathology is one of the discipline under meidical education. Similarly, building pathology (Watt, 2007) is also devloped in the filed of civil engineering. Wang & Yau (2002) pointed out in their book, *Building Pathology*, building health can be compared analogously with human health. Therefore, a large amount of human pathology studies have been carried out to understand

Building Medicine is not a discipline of pure theories. It has already been practiced on real cases. The author has already undertaken the three roles of Building Medicine outlined in Fig. 2. For the role of Health Care of Buildings, the previous position held by the author in the asset mangement industry was a consultant for household health diagnoses. Even though he is an assistant professor in Feng Chia University now, he teaches a service-learning course (Course Title: Building Diagnosis Technology) and leads students to provide test service of hazard factors in public environments of communities. For the role of Scientific Researches of Building, recent researches on application technologies are shown in Section 2.3 of this paper. The author also advised many master's theses which discuss diagnoses and solutions on health hazard factors in household environments, such as detection of EMF in living environments (Ma, 2010). As to Medical Education of Buildings, he opens many courses to teach students how to plan, make diagnoses, manage, and maintain a healthy living

Safety and health of the occupants can only be safeguarded on the condition that the occupied buildings are in a healthy

state

the essence of diseases and find their treatmeant and prevention methods.

Maintaining a Building's Health

**2.2 Roles played by Building Medicine** 

Fig. 2. Roles Played by Building Medicine

Roles of Building Medicine

Health Care of Buildings Scientific Researches of Buildings Medical Education of Buildings
