A Lifecycle Health Performance Tree for Sustainable Healthy Buildings

A residential environment configured under inappropriate architectural planning could have a harmful influence on the health of users. Such an issue has led to requirements to improve and to evaluate the health performance of buildings. A proper health performance evaluation would aid tenants or purchasers to make a suitable decision, while also providing building owners and house sellers with useful information regarding the health performance of the buildings. The overall health performance of a building should not merely be a total evaluation score of factors, but a framework that reflects the characteristics and importance of each health-affecting factor. In addition, the overall health performance should include a concept that would enable the use of the tool to estimate and improve the health performance not only at the actual operational stage after completion of a building but over the entire lifecycle including planning, design and construction. To this end, a lifecycle health performance tree (LHT) for sustainable healthy buildings has been developed by this study. Unlike the existing method, which measures the indoor air quality, light and noise factors of a completed space, LHT provides an overall evaluation of the health performance of a space during planning.