Search Results (3,399)

The use of hazardous chemicals in construction materials raises concerns regarding their release into the environment and their potential impact on ecosystems and human health. This study investigated the flows of tris(2-chloro-1-methylethyl) phosphate (TCPP), diuron, and bis(2-(perfluorohexyl)ethyl) phosphate (6:2 diPAP) from buildings to environmental compartments and evaluated their toxicological relevance through environmental occurrence and exposure pathways. A quantitative substance flow analysis was performed for TCPP, while conceptual flow models were developed for diuron and 6:2 diPAP. TCPP flow analysis showed that approximately 70,804 t/year accumulated in products, primarily rigid polyurethane insulation materials, alongside continuous environmental releases into indoor dust, soils, and aquatic systems. It resulted in annual accumulation of nearly 444 t of TCPP in soils and 64 t in aquatic systems. Diuron was identified as a source of aquatic exposure through rainfall-driven wash-off, whereas 6:2 diPAP exhibited indoor and outdoor emission pathways and transformation into persistent perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids. Field measurements of Interreg NonHazCity3 project confirmed the occurrence of organophosphate esters, biocides, and PFAS in indoor dust, stormwater, and wastewater. The results demonstrate that buildings act as continuous sources of toxicologically relevant substances, pointing to the necessity of upstream source control, the prevention of regrettable chemical substitution, and enhanced transparency in construction materials to mitigate long-term environmental and health risks. Full article

The increasing demand for sustainable outdoor lighting has accelerated the development of solar-powered lighting systems. However, conventional solar lamps typically employ fixed illumination levels and simple day–night switching mechanisms, resulting in inefficient battery utilization and limited adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This study proposes a TRIZ-guided intelligent solar-powered lighting system that integrates photovoltaic energy harvesting, adaptive pulse-width modulation (PWM)-based illumination control, ultrasonic sensing, wireless communication, and embedded control into a unified standalone platform. The TRIZ contradiction matrix was employed during the conceptual design stage to systematically resolve key engineering contradictions involving illumination performance, energy efficiency, hardware complexity, battery lifetime, and user convenience. The proposed prototype was developed using an AT89S51 microcontroller to coordinate battery charging protection, environmental sensing, adaptive brightness regulation, and manual wireless operation. Experimental validation demonstrated stable photovoltaic charging with a regulated battery charging voltage of 14.4 V, reliable execution of embedded control functions, seamless transition between manual and autonomous operating modes, and adaptive LED brightness regulation according to real-time environmental conditions. The integrated PWM control strategy reduced unnecessary energy consumption by dynamically adjusting illumination intensity based on object detection rather than maintaining constant full-power operation. The experimental results further verified the feasibility of combining software-driven adaptive control with renewable energy harvesting to achieve intelligent energy management without increasing hardware complexity. Overall, the proposed system demonstrates that the integration of TRIZ-based systematic innovation with embedded intelligent control provides a practical, energy-efficient, and cost-effective solution for autonomous outdoor lighting. The proposed architecture offers valuable engineering insights for future smart lighting applications in off-grid infrastructure, sustainable communities, and smart city environments. Full article

Outdoor pedestrian wind comfort and indoor natural ventilation are important aspects of wind environment performance in high-rise residential developments. However, the two objectives are evaluated in different spatial domains and may exhibit inconsistent responses to changes in design parameters. Identifying solutions that balance both objectives through conventional trial-and-error design becomes increasingly difficult as the number of variables and candidate combinations increases. This study develops a multi-objective optimization method that integrates parametric modeling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and a hybrid NSGA-II–MOPSO algorithm to coordinate outdoor and indoor wind performance. Building positions, orientations, and window locations are represented by a 13-dimensional design vector. Outdoor pedestrian wind comfort and indoor natural ventilation are quantified using two objective functions, DCTC_out and DCTC_in, defined as the ratios of evaluation points outside the prescribed comfort ranges to those within them. Indoor simulations use façade pressures obtained from the outdoor CFD calculations as boundary inputs. The method is applied to a planned high-rise residential development in Chongqing, China. The optimization used a population of 25 candidate designs over 50 generations, yielding 1250 CFD-evaluated designs. The population mean values of DCTC_out and DCTC_in decreased by 16.25% and 17.62%, respectively, while their best-so-far values reached 2.14888 and 0.52469. Nine solutions remained on the final first non-dominated front, representing different trade-offs between outdoor and indoor performance. Compared with the outdoor-priority solution, the compromise solution increased DCTC_out by only 3.81% while reducing DCTC_in by 22.81%. Further improvement in indoor performance was accompanied by a substantially greater deterioration in outdoor performance. The results support the joint consideration of residential layout and opening design when outdoor and indoor wind performance are evaluated simultaneously. Full article

Background/Objectives: Markerless video-based gait assessment has emerged as a promising alternative to laboratory motion capture systems because it enables objective, low-cost, and accessible mobility assessment. However, evidence supporting the validity of deep learning (DL)-based markerless video systems for gait speed assessment during the 10-meter walk test (10-MWT) in real-world clinical environments remains limited. This study evaluated the concurrent validity of a DL-based markerless video system for estimating gait speed during the 10-MWT under outdoor clinical conditions. Methods: Thirty-two healthy participants from three age groups completed the 10-MWT under comfortable, slow, and fast walking conditions. Gait speed was simultaneously measured using the proposed DL-based markerless video system with the YOLOv11x model and Tracker video analysis software (version 6.3.2). Gait speed was calculated across six consecutive 1 m walking segments. Concurrent validity was evaluated using Pearson’s correlation coefficients and Bland-Altman analysis. Results: Pearson’s correlation coefficients ranged from 0.92 to 0.98 across all six walking segments and walking-speed conditions, indicating very high concurrent validity. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated good agreement between the proposed system and the reference method, with mean differences close to zero and most observations falling within the 95% limits of agreement. The proposed system maintained high agreement across comfortable, slow, and fast walking conditions while enabling segment-specific gait speed analysis throughout the 10-MWT. Conclusions: The proposed DL-based markerless video system demonstrated high agreement with Tracker for gait speed assessment during the 10-MWT under outdoor non-laboratory conditions, supporting its potential as an accessible approach for gait speed assessment. Full article

Adaptive thermal comfort is essential for understanding occupants’ responses to indoor thermal environments in residential buildings. However, field studies on adaptive thermal comfort in urban dwellings in Nepal remain limited, and the influence of skin moisture sensation on thermal comfort has not been investigated. This study examines adaptive thermal comfort and skin moisture sensation in naturally ventilated urban dwellings during summer. Field data were collected from 1011 occupants in Bhaktapur district, Nepal, while indoor and outdoor thermal conditions were monitored simultaneously. The results show that occupants experienced the highest thermal comfort at an average comfort temperature of 26.0 °C. More than 95% of the observed comfort temperatures were within the acceptable ranges specified by ISO and ASHRAE adaptive comfort standards. In addition, the comfort temperature decreased by approximately 1.1 K as skin moisture sensation increased from none to slightly, indicating that sweating influences thermal comfort perception. These findings demonstrate that naturally ventilated urban dwellings in Nepal can provide acceptable thermal comfort under international standards and highlight the importance of incorporating skin moisture sensation into adaptive thermal comfort assessments. The results also suggest the potential implication of the thermal comfort findings to reduce residential cooling energy demand by promoting natural ventilation and occupants’ adaptive behaviors. Full article

Outdoor settings on a campus can respond differently to summer heat and winter cold. This exploratory case study compared twelve predefined settings on a university campus in Tianjin using a summer peak-solar subset and a winter daytime subset drawn from two 72 h analysis windows in June and December 2025. Three Kestrel 5400 LiNK units and eight shielded DS1923 loggers were deployed at a height of 1.5 m. Direct instrument records were combined with archived background-weather and point-specific inputs on a 10 min grid, with measured and calculated fields identified separately. The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) and mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) were expressed as anomalies from the contemporaneous twelve-location median. Point-cloud proxies at 10, 25, and 50 m described each location. The summer episode was hot and rain-free, whereas the winter episode was mild, humid, and calm. P09 had the largest negative summer ΔUTCI (−6.80 °C), P07 the largest winter deficit (−5.11 °C), and P10 showed a change from positive in summer to negative in winter. These patterns persisted in candidate-substitution and wind-height checks. The assembled case-campus data identify locations for repeat, fully synchronized monitoring. Full article

Traditional dwellings in humid subtropical China contain climate-adaptive spatial elements, yet their outdoor thermal-comfort performance and passive optimization potential remain insufficiently quantified. This study examined three traditional Minnan mansions in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, to evaluate how courtyards, alleyways, recessed entrance spaces, and peripheral vegetation regulate summer outdoor thermal environments. Field microclimate monitoring, UAV photogrammetry, and ENVI-met/BioMet simulations were combined, and baseline models were validated using measured air temperature and relative humidity data. Single-element scenarios were developed for ground albedo adjustment, courtyard shading, alleyway green pergolas, recessed entrance shading, increased fengshui woodland density, and optimized woodland layout, followed by multi-element combined strategies. The results indicate that shading and vegetation-related measures reduced daytime heat stress primarily by limiting solar radiation exposure, improving near-ground thermal and humidity conditions, and modifying local wind fields. Combined strategies produced more stable UTCI improvements than individual interventions, with a maximum UTCI reduction of 7.5 °C. In contrast, high-albedo paving reduced local air temperature but could worsen UTCI by increasing reflected short-wave radiation. These findings provide quantitative support for low-intervention thermal environment optimization and climate-adaptive renewal of traditional dwellings in humid–hot regions. Full article

Radon is a major contributor to natural radiation exposure in humans and requires reliable monitoring of its concentrations in indoor and outdoor environments. This paper presents a pulse-proportional ionization chamber with a working volume of 8 L, developed for direct measurement of low radon concentrations. A double-cylindrical coaxial design enables nearly complete detection of $\alpha$ radiation. A specially developed spectroscopic evaluation method was implemented to separate the ²²²Rn contribution from the spectral components of the short-lived decay products, ²¹⁸Po, and ²¹⁴Po, thereby enabling a more accurate determination of radon activity concentration. Acoustic and vibration interference are effectively suppressed, which enables an energy resolution of approximately 2%. At a radon activity concentration of 50 Bq/m³, measurement uncertainties of less than 5% are achieved after just 30 min of measurement time. These characteristics make the system a powerful instrument for high-resolution radon monitoring in ambient air. Full article

Free-ranging pet cats have been identified as significant predators of wildlife. Managing this conflict is challenging, because control of movement ultimately lies with the owner. Previous research has focused on the influence of environmental, intrinsic, husbandry-, and personality-related factors on cats’ behavior when stepping out the door. However, an overlooked driver is the strength of the cat–owner relationship. In this explorative study, we used animal-borne video cameras to document the outdoor behavior of 12 cats and in parallel assessed the relationship with their owners through the Cat–Owner Relationship Scale (CORS), along with intrinsic (age and sex) and husbandry-related (cat’s role, cat’s restriction and roaming pattern, parasite treatment, and provisioning households) determinants. We found no statistical evidence of a direct influence of the cat–owner relationship on exploratory and hunting behaviors, but owners with higher CORS scores observed more harassment incidents by their cats and owners reporting more hunting behavior tended to own cats that roamed more in nature; those cats also explored more. We further observed high individual variability in hunting and time allocated to urban and natural environments. Comparing our results with the previous literature, we conclude that outdoor behavior largely varies between individual cats and is difficult to predict. However, the greater awareness of cat–wildlife conflict among owners with stronger bonds may provide an opportunity to promote changes in owner behavior. Full article

Conventional image acquisition requires an electrically powered image sensor to be placed directly behind the camera lens, constraining camera placement. To overcome this issue, we introduce M3-RGB as an incoherent-light fiber imaging system in which a multicore, multimode optical fiber passively relays lens images to a remotely located image sensor. Unlike conventional approaches, M3-RGB is designed to operate directly on incoherent light and requires no electrical power or active components at the sensing interface. Because propagation through the fiber yields spatially scrambled patterns, a neural network is used to reconstruct the original scene by exploiting the spatial locality preserved by the multicore structure. In a controlled optical bench setup, where a liquid crystal display monitor displays road-scene images, we construct a paired dataset of scrambled and ground-truth images and quantitatively evaluate reconstruction performance across different fiber core counts, fiber lengths, and calibration settings, utilizing the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index measure as performance metrics. By decoupling imaging electronics from the sensing point, this passive remote image relay approach may expand sensor placement options for potential applications such as all-around perception for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, surveillance, and inspection in confined spaces. Evaluations in real outdoor environments constitute future work. Full article

The precise detection and pose estimation of electric vehicle (EV) charging ports in unstructured outdoor environments remain challenging due to small sizes, variable illumination, and stringent tolerance requirements for robotic plug-in operations. To address these issues, this paper presents a hybrid perception framework that integrates an attention-embedded detection network with geometrically constrained pose optimization. For robust detection, CBAM-YOLOv11 is proposed, which incorporates a sequential channel-spatial attention module into the backbone network to enhance feature representation of texture-less small targets while suppressing background clutter and glare. Then, a topological geometric constraint-based method is developed for accurate pose estimation. Specifically, the 2D-3D correspondences are purified before being fed into an Efficient Perspective-n-Point (EPnP) solver, while a nonlinear refinement with rigid distance priors is applied as regularization. Extensive experiments on the dataset and a physical robotic platform demonstrate that the proposed detector achieves 99.2% mAP@0.5 and a 24.6 percentage point improvement in mAP@0.5:0.95 over the baseline YOLOv11. The pose estimation module reduces positioning standard deviations along the X, Y, and Z axes to 4.72 mm, 5.65 mm, and 5.60 mm, respectively, surpassing conventional EPnP by about 60%. In 30 repeated robotic insertion trials, the system attains a 93.3% success rate with approximately 78 ms, fully satisfying real-time and precision requirements for autonomous EV charging. Full article

Contemporary urban environments are characterized by intense and continuous activity, resulting in a significant transformation of the ambient acoustic environment. Noise pollution from sources such as traffic, construction, industry, and recreation propagate throughout these areas, although some residents may report a low perception of disturbance even under high exposure levels. This study investigates the moderating influence of housing conditions on the relationship between outdoor noise levels and perceived indoor acoustic environment in Coimbra, Portugal. The methodology combines primary data on housing characteristics and subjective indoor noise perception, obtained through a questionnaire survey, with secondary data from an environ-mental noise map. Logistic regression models, incorporating interaction terms, were employed to evaluate the moderating effect of housing conditions. The results demonstrate a statistically significant association between outdoor noise exposure and perceived indoor noise, with a limited moderating effect of housing conditions on this relationship. Full article

Global concern surrounding declining outdoor play, physical activity, and children’s engagement with natural environments has prompted increased interest in nature-based early childhood education (ECE). Within such settings, outdoor spaces are positioned as central to learning, supporting embodied and authentic interaction with the natural world. Despite expansion in provision, limited research has examined how parents and practitioners conceptualise the value of nature-based ECE or how their perspectives intersect across ecological contexts. This qualitative study investigated the key perspectives of parents and practitioners in nature-based ECE settings in England. Following institutional ethical approval, 16 participants were recruited: seven parents (all female) of children aged three to five years attending nature-based ECE settings and nine practitioners (eight females, one male). Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: Protecting children’s rights; Nature as a context for whole-child development; Risk, resilience, and physicality; Communities of learning; and Beyond the setting: systemic pressures and parental fears. Choosing nature-based ECE reflects a proactive, health-promoting decision grounded in parental values concerning children’s rights to nature and outdoor play. Practitioner commitment was similarly values-driven, centred on children’s freedoms and positioned in tension with prevailing societal norms. Key findings illuminate practitioners’ concerns regarding the perceived absence of outdoor-based provision across mainstream ECE and schooling, highlighting the need for clearer regulatory frameworks to establish quality outdoor play in nature as a systemic entitlement. Full article

Ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning provides cost-effective localization for quadrotors in global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied environments, but geometry-dependent, heavy-tailed errors challenge state estimation and safety-critical control. This paper presents a risk-aware framework linking geometry-aware error quantification with belief-space collision avoidance under a fixed four-anchor UWB configuration. Specifically, horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) and nearest-anchor distance are used as spatial features in a Student’s-t process regression (STPR) model to predict UWB positioning errors and quantify the associated uncertainty. The compensated UWB measurements are then fused with inertial data through a Kalman filter to obtain a Gaussian belief state. A belief control barrier function (BCBF) maps ellipsoidal collision regions to a unit sphere, approximates them using tangent half-spaces, and is embedded in nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). In outdoor flight experiments, the positioning RMSE is reduced to 0.071 m by the proposed STPR-KF method, compared with 0.299 m for raw UWB and 0.292 m for conventional KF. Feasible risk-aware obstacle avoidance and adjustable safety clearance are further demonstrated through numerical simulations. The feasibility of linking geometry-aware UWB error characterization with belief-space safety constraints for UWB-localized quadrotor navigation is therefore indicated. Full article

Moisture is present in every feature of the anthroposphere, and its occurrence in air has a profound impact on life. It has an impact on all aspects of the built environment, inside which modern occupants spend nearly 90% of their time. While moisture’s influence on the individual aspects of functional building performance, indoor air quality (IAQ), thermal comfort, and occupant health is well recognized, holistic studies examining the interdependencies among these aspects remain lacking, with the existing literature fragmented across climate studies, building physics, thermal comfort, epidemiology, and medicine. This review adopts a critical synthesis approach to trace moisture’s role across these disciplines, from the outdoor microclimate through the building envelope to the indoor environment and occupant. The synthesis reveals moisture’s dual role as a determinant of IAQ, thermal comfort, and occupant wellness, and as a physical driver of building material durability, structural performance, and operational energy consumption, with these moisture-driven interactions across scales found to be tightly interdependent. Based on this synthesis, a multi-disciplinary framework is proposed, linking the microclimate, building, occupant, and planetary health levels through moisture, identifying key interdisciplinary research gaps and providing a foundation for practical interventions toward occupant and planetary health. Full article