Conforto térmico em atividade de escritório no clima quente e úmido: influência das ações adaptativas no trabalho presencial e remoto

Abstract

This study explored how adaptive actions affect occupants' thermal perception during the workday in two types of buildings—offices with artificial air conditioning and homes with mostly natural ventilation—in a hot and humid climate city. Using empirical data from environmental measurements and 632 questionnaires completed by participants, the study assessed the predictive power of adaptive actions on thermal perception in each building type during both face-to-face and remote work. The predictive analysis employed six machine learning algorithms to forecast comfort levels, heat or cold discomfort, testing various combinations of environmental, personal, and adaptive variables. Office and home environments displayed contrasting thermal conditions and perceptions, as did the adaptive actions, which varied by building type. In offices, drinking beverages and wearing extra clothing were common; in homes, light clothing and opening windows were predominant. Including multiple adaptive variables improved model performance for offices (notably Support Vector Machines, F1 score = 0.83, and Random Forest, F1 score = 0.81). For households, the models performed well regardless of these variables (F1 score = 0.95). The results confirm the importance of adaptive variables in predicting thermal perception in air-conditioned buildings, highlighting the need to consider human behavior in thermal comfort models. Conversely, in homes, although actions like “wearing light clothing” were common during remote work, they did not significantly improve prediction accuracy. The consistency of this behavior made it difficult to identify statistical differences, reducing the explanatory power of adaptive variables in modeling subjective comfort. This research highlights the importance of creating more inclusive and locally representative predictive models that consider diverse occupational backgrounds and real environmental conditions, especially in hot and humid regions, where actual circumstances often go beyond international standards.