REAL NEEDS AND PREVENTIVE STRATEGIES FOR MAINTAINING SUSTAINABLE QUALITY OF LIFE IN ENVIRONMENTS WITH AIR CONDITIONING

Quality of life, which has been assessed by measuring the degree to which objective human needs are met in relation to personal or group perceptions, has been largely investigated over the years.In this direction, various methods and techniques have been employed in order to determine the most effective criteria and indicators of obtaining adequate residential or work spaces.It can be said that one of the priorities of a "healthy" building is to comply with health and comfort criteria.Various organizations all over the world consider that the built environment is characterized by a number of parameters which might threaten human health.The effects upon human health of the time spent in a building could not be entirely explained.The performance indicators used nowadays are not enough to perform a correct assessment and many times the current standards differ greatly from the needs of those who work in these spaces.Taking into consideration the fact that urban society spends more and more time indoors, indoor air quality has become an important public health problem at global scale.Besides the benefits of comfort it brings, air conditioning can affect human health, because it greatly modifies the environment in which the individual is placed.The strategies employed to ameliorate the conditions offered by modern buildings imply measures related to the indoor environment and also to the building itself.Preventive methods for maintaining a sustainable quality of life in an air conditioned environment address the human factor and imply a close medical evaluation of candidate employees, in order to avoid the occurrence of some disorders in those people who are prone to illnesses determined by this type of environment according to their personal or family medical history, or the decompensation of already existing illnesses.