Caraterização do sono em estudantes universitários: A influência da Qualidade do Ar Interior

Sleep is a crucial factor on human well-being because it is through sleep that we recover from physical and psychological fatigue from our daily lives. Furthermore, sleep deprivation can bring harming consequences. The objectives of this study are to characterize the sleep quality of the Portuguese population and asses the influence of indoor air quality (IAQ) on the sleep quality of university students housed in student dormitories near Lisbon. For the first phase, it was constructed a questionnaire composed by four sleep tests and distributed online, getting 1040 responses from the whole country. In the second phase, it was monitored the IAQ of the bedrooms of 13 university students, housed in university residences, during two consecutive nights. During the same period the students’ sleep was also monitored through actigraphy and sleep diaries. Finally, it was assessed the influence of the IAQ parameters on student’s sleep quality. Through the answers to the sleep questionnaire it was verified that a reasonable fraction of the population didn’t show good sleep. The groups that scored worse results in the sleep tests were the students and the people that reported worse perceived IAQ. Regarding the monitoring of IAQ in the students’ bedrooms, the levels of CO2 and VOCs surpassed the legal limit values. Besides that, CO2 and relative humidity and ambient temperature showed influence on sleep.

Type of publication: Master Thesis of the Integrated Master in Environmental Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.