Due to the multiple benefits on energy, well-being, comfort, and the economy, the utilization of daylight remains an imperative topic of architectural design. With the remarkable ability of drawing and increasing daylight deep into the core of buildings, atriums with a large proportion of glazing have become one of the most preferred design forms. The concomitant and unexpected visual discomfort in modern buildings, however, has drawn increasing concerns. Therefore, this study investigated the relation between glazing proportion and daylight performance, as well as the impact of building height and atrium types on daylight performance in atrium buildings by using an annual dynamic simulation method and metrics. It was found that extending glazing proportion had prominent effectiveness in the enhancement of daylighting; building height had a negative influence; round and square types of buildings performed much better than rectangular ones. Moreover, to inform a practical design, we analyzed the link between increasing daylight and visual comfort from the perspective of balancing them, and then proposed a design guide for atrium roof-glazing sizing.

Urban green spaces (UGSs) satisfy citizens’ physical and psychological demands and are considered an integral part of sustainable urban development. However, the distribution of UGS is often uneven, especially in historic urban areas with high building density and limited facilities, thus leading to issues of green inequity. This study examines two dimensions of green equity in Qingdao’s historic urban area, distributional equity and perceived equity, based on a fine-grained division of units and districts. Distributional equity is analyzed using the Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (G2SFCA) method and Gini coefficient to accurately calculate the equity in distribution and accessibility of UGSs. The perceived equity is assessed through the green view index (GVI) and location quotient of the streets, which represents citizens’ visual perception of green quality. Based on these analyses, a dual-perspective evaluation model of green equity is conducted, and the results show a significant imbalance of greenery supply and population demand in the historical urban area of Qingdao. This disequilibrium in green spaces leads to 62.20% of people living with low green equity, while only 8.12% experience high green equity. To maximize social justice, priority should be given to improving the 15 districts with low green equity; doing so could effectively reduce green inequity within historic urban areas where facilities and resources are relatively scarce, thereby improving the efficiency of urban renewal efforts.

Background: Air pollution has adverse effects on human health, while people experience regular contact with air pollutants in a high concentration via inhalation and ingestion. Nowadays, the average person spends more than 90% of their lifetime inside both private and public buildings, and this figure can reach close to 100% for the sick or elderly who cannot take care of themselves. Attention should be paid to indoor air quality (IAQ), especially for certain groups in specific places. Purpose: This study intends to investigate indoor air quality in a large general hospital in Northern China, where people desire clean air for good nursing, and then propose solutions to any air pollution present. Methods: Some influential factors related to air pollution, including PM_2.5 and PM₁₀, were measured in winter. Observations were applied to indicate that the smoking behaviors of medical staff were an important contributor to air pollution. Experimental measurements were designed to test the concentration of airborne nicotine. Questionnaire surveys and follow-up interviews were conducted to understand attitudes towards smoking behaviors and offer design strategies. Results: The scopes of 24 h mean concentrations of PM_2.5 (10.2~57.8 µg/m³, 17.5~45.5 µg/m³, and 20.5~91.1 µg/m³) and PM₁₀ (17.7~81.8 µg/m³, 13.0~83.8 µg/m³, and 31.7~188.1 µg/m³) exceeded relevant guideline values, and the airborne nicotine concentrations (1.29 µg/m³ and 1.62 µg/m³) confirmed that smoking behaviors occurred in the consulting room. Conclusions: To control tobacco to ensure good indoor air quality, smoking behaviors should be managed instead of forbidden. This will also provide greater satisfaction to medical staff. Smoking behavior management requires a comprehensive consideration based on ambient conditions and psychological demands. As there is a lack of specific requirements in relevant design regulations that are tailored to ensure the environmental satisfaction of medical staff, the findings from this study can be used as evidence to inform the design of healthcare environments for public health in future.

In research related to cognitive performance, temperature is often regarded as a core influencing factor and has received significant attention. However, as a key component of the building thermal environment, solar radiation and its mechanism of action on cognitive performance have rarely been studied. This paper conducts a laboratory study, using an infrared radiation heater to simulate the thermal effect of solar radiation, and explores the age-related differences between the elderly and the young in thermal comfort, electroencephalogram (EEG) activity, and cognitive ability under three radiation intensities (0 W, 500 W, and 1000 W). The results show that age has a relatively small impact on subjective thermal responses but a significant impact on mental state and cognitive performance. In the infrared radiation environment, the alertness (ALV score) of the elderly remains more stable, while young people show an increased sense of drowsiness. EEG analysis indicates that the frontal lobe logarithmic power of both groups of subjects is 4.55–6.79% higher than the average of other brain regions. High radiation (1000 W) inhibits the EEG activity of young people but triggers compensatory activation in the elderly, thus reducing age-related neural differences. Cognitive tests show that compared with the non-radiation condition, high infrared radiation (1000 W) significantly improves the cognitive levels of the elderly in terms of attention (CPT: +1.53%), response ability (DLT: +0.78%) and visual search ability (VST: +2.04%), while these abilities decline in young people (CPT: −2.78%, DLT: −1.21%, VST: −3.82%). The correlation analysis between EEG and cognitive tests identifies that the right frontal electrodes (F4, F8) and the occipital O1 may be potential candidate electrodes for evaluating the cognitive performance of the elderly and young people. This study provides crucial objective physiological evidence for clarifying the relationship between heat sources such as the thermal effect of solar radiation, which “acts directly on the human body”, and human thermal comfort and cognitive performance.

Intelligent housing-dimensional urban physical examination requires evaluating complex visual scenes in aging communities. Existing methods and datasets are insufficient for these heterogeneous tasks and severe class imbalances. To address this, we introduce the Housing-dimensiOnal visUal inSpection imagE Dataset (HOUSED) with a hierarchical labeling scheme, and propose a hierarchical Vision Mixture of Experts (VMoE) framework. At its core, the proposed CS-DisVMoE module utilizes a CS-Soft routing mechanism to capture spatial feature correlations, optimizing expert assignment and reducing inference overhead. Additionally, a FENNEL-based non-linear graph partitioning mechanism converts pre-trained dense weights into semantically coherent expert initializations, accelerating convergence while preserving localized visual clustering. To address the hierarchical labels, we design a composite loss function: a Supervised Contrastive Loss acts as a parent-category soft constraint to accelerate convergence, while Focal Loss mitigates data imbalance and handles fine-grained subcategory classification via hard sample mining. Across evaluated datasets, the full proposed framework improves accuracy by an average of 4.3% over the ViT-Tiny baseline and 1.81% over the best-performing VMoE baseline. Furthermore, it achieves these improvements with lower computational costs. Further tests on mixed public vision datasets verify its generalizability and competitive performance for complex-scene applications.